A High-Performance Elliptic Curve Cryptographic Processor over GF(p) with SPA Resistance

Abstract

In order to support high speed application such as cloud computing, we propose a new elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC) processor architecture. The proposed processor includes a 3 pipelined-stage full-word Montgomery multiplier which requires much fewer execution cycles than that of previous methods. To reach real-time requirement, the time-cost pre-computation steps of Montgomery modular multiplication are achieved by hardware as well. Moreover, our proposed processor is resistant to the simple power analysis (SPA) attack by using the Montgomery ladder-based elliptic curve scalar multiplication (ECSM). Even the Montgomery ladder method inherently has operation overhead compared with traditional binary ECSM, both of hardware sharing and parallelization techniques are exploited to improve the hardware performance. Synthesized in TSMC 90nm CMOS technology, our proposed ECC processor performs a 256-bit ECSM in 120 mu s over prime field with 540K gate counts. This result is at least 25% better than relative works in terms of area-time (AT) product.