Abstract

This paper presents a reconfigurable hardware architecture for public-key cryptosystems. By changing the connections of coarse grain carry-save adders (CSAs), the datapath provides high performance modular operations that can be used for both RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). In addition, we introduce reconfigurable flip-flops in order to make an optimal choice of hardware resources. The proposed datapath is implemented with a 0.25-µm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology and on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). We compare the performance of modular exponentiation for RSA and scalar multiplication for ECC based on the prototype implementation. The results show that higher performance is obtained for ECC on the same hardware platform.

Highlights

  • The idea of public-key cryptography was introduced in the mid 1970s (Diffie and Hellman 1976)

  • The results show that the proposed reconfigurable datapath is a suitable solution for high-performance public-key cryptosystems, such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)

  • Comparing the two with the same hardware resources and with corresponding bit-lengths that provide similar security, we found that ECC-256p allows higher performance than RSA-2048

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Summary

Introduction

The idea of public-key cryptography was introduced in the mid 1970s (Diffie and Hellman 1976). They showed that one can eliminate the need for prior agreement of a key in order to exchange some confidential data. The best-known and most commonly used public-key cryptosystems are RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The contribution in this paper deals with an architectural solution for a reconfigurable datapath that is used for RSA and ECC over a field of a prime characteristic. The results show that the proposed reconfigurable datapath is a suitable solution for high-performance public-key cryptosystems, such as RSA and ECC. The main contribution of our work i.e. the reconfigurable datapath is explained in x 5.

Related work
Mathematical background
8: Return A
À x1 À x2 ðx1 À x3Þ À y1
Datapath of the MALU
Functionality of the MALU
Reconfigurable datapath
Performance estimation for RSA and ECC
Comparison with previous work
Conclusions

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