Efficient FPGA design of exception-free generic elliptic curve cryptosystems (Q2117041)

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is one of the promising cryptosystems in embedded systems as it provides high-security levels with short keys. Therefore, ECC is becoming a mainstream cryptosystem in embedded systems where memory resources are constrained. The dominant computation of ECCs is scalar multiplication, which computes \(kP\) for an elliptic curve point \(P\) and a scalar \(k\). In this paper, the main focus is on efficient hardware-software FPGA design of generic ECC with less memory which is secure against SPA and satisfies exception-free for any \(k\). Especially, the authors consider the system-on-chip (SoC) type of an FPGA device. The key points in its design are (1) secure and exception-free for any scalar with less memory usage, (2) long-bit modular arithmetic modules utilizing today's advanced and high-performance programmable logic and considering the balance between the modules in terms of propagation delay, (3) parallelism extraction inside each elliptic curve point computation as well as between the point computations, and (4) efficient hardware-software co-processing facilitated by application interfaces between a processing core and hardware modules. The evaluation results demonstrate that this design achieves the best performance to existing FPGA designs without using a table for generic ECC. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1482.94010].