Optimized FPGA-based elliptic curve cryptography processor for high-speed applications

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an FPGA-based processor for elliptic curve cryptography on Koblitz curves. The processor targets specifically to applications requiring very high speed. The processor is optimized for performing scalar multiplications, which are the basic operations of every elliptic curve cryptosystem, only on one specific Koblitz curve; the support for other curves is achieved by reconfiguring the FPGA. We combine efficient methods from various recent papers into a very efficient processor architecture. The processor includes carefully designed processing units dedicated for different parts of the scalar multiplication in order to increase performance. The computation is pipelined providing simultaneous processing of up to three scalar multiplications. We provide experimental results on an Altera Stratix II FPGA demonstrating that the processor computes a single scalar multiplication on average in 11.71 μ s and achieves a throughput of 235,550 scalar multiplications per second on NIST K-163.