A comparison of different finite fields for elliptic curve cryptosystems (Q5948821)

This paper compares the performance of the author's implemention of field operations for four fields that are commonly used for elliptic curve cryptosystems. The author also provides performance data for these fields when used as a basis for elliptic curve cryptography. The fields in consideration are \(F_p\) for general primes, where Montgomery arithmetic was implemented, \(F_p\) for Mersenne primes, fields of characteristic two, and optimized extentions fields (OEF). The author implemented all arithmetic on 32-bit processors. He concludes that the OEF perform best, although only marginally better than \(F_p\) with \(p\) being a Mersenne prime.