Lightweight ECC Coprocessor With Resistance Against Power Analysis Attacks Over NIST Prime Fields

Abstract

This brief proposes a compact and fast elliptic curve cryptography coprocessor using affine coordinates. Although using affine coordinates requires compute-intensive modular inversion (ModInv), the proposed coprocessor can be accelerated using the improved ModInv. In addition, the study proposes a novel point multiplication method that is effective in preventing simple power analysis when affine coordinates are used. Using point randomization, the proposed coprocessor is also resistant to statistical power analysis (PA) such as differential PA (DPA) and correlation PA (CPA), and it requires 60 k gate counts and can perform one elliptic curve point multiplication within 1 ms at the maximum clock frequency.