A versatile Montgomery multiplier architecture with characteristic three support

We present a novel unified core design which is extended to realize Montgomery multiplication in the fields GF(2n), GF(3m), and GF(p). Our unified design supports RSA and elliptic curve schemes, as well as the identity-based encryption which requires a pairing computation on an elliptic curve. The architecture is pipelined and is highly scalable. The unified core utilizes the redundant signed digit representation to reduce the critical path delay. While the carry-save representation used in classical unified architectures is only good for addition and multiplication operations, the redundant signed digit representation also facilitates efficient computation of comparison and subtraction operations besides addition and multiplication. Thus, there is no need for a transformation between the redundant and the non-redundant representations of field elements, which would be required in the classical unified architectures to realize the subtraction and comparison operations. We also quantify the benefits of the unified architectures in terms of area and critical path delay. We provide detailed implementation results. The metric shows that the new unified architecture provides an improvement over a hypothetical non-unified architecture of at least 24.88%, while the improvement over a classical unified architecture is at least 32.07%

Throughput/Area-efficient ECC Processor Using Montgomery Point Multiplication on FPGA

High throughput while maintaining low resource is a key issue for elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) hardware implementations in many applications. In this brief, an ECC processor architecture over Galois fields is presented, which achieves the best reported throughput/area performance on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to date. A novel segmented pipelining digit serial multiplier is developed to speed up ECC point multiplication. To achieve low latency, a new combined algorithm is developed for point addition and point doubling with careful scheduling. A compact and flexible distributed-RAM-based memory unit design is developed to increase speed while keeping area low. Further optimizations were made via timing constraints and logic level modifications at the implementation level. The proposed architecture is implemented on Virtex4 (V4), Virtex5 (V5), and Virtex7 (V7) FPGA technologies and, respectively, achieved throughout/slice figures of 19.65, 65.30, and 64.48 (106/(Seconds × Slices))

High Speed and Low Latency ECC Implementation over GF(2m) on FPGA

In this paper, a novel high-speed elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) processor implementation for point multiplication (PM) on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is proposed. A new segmented pipelined full-precision multiplier is used to reduce the latency, and the Lopez-Dahab Montgomery PM algorithm is modified for careful scheduling to avoid data dependency resulting in a drastic reduction in the number of clock cycles (CCs) required. The proposed ECC architecture has been implemented on Xilinx FPGAs' Virtex4, Virtex5, and Virtex7 families. To the best of our knowledge, our single- and three-multiplier-based designs show the fastest performance to date when compared with reported works individually. Our one-multiplier-based ECC processor also achieves the highest reported speed together with the best reported area-time performance on Virtex4 (5.32 μs at 210 MHz), on Virtex5 (4.91 μs at 228 MHz), and on the more advanced Virtex7 (3.18 μs at 352 MHz). Finally, the proposed three-multiplier-based ECC implementation is the first work reporting the lowest number of CCs and the fastest ECC processor design on FPGA (450 CCs to get 2.83 μs on Virtex7)

Efficient Implementation on Low-Cost SoC-FPGAs of TLSv1.2 Protocol with ECC_AES Support for Secure IoT Coordinators

Security management for IoT applications is a critical research field, especially when taking into account the performance variation over the very different IoT devices. In this paper, we present high-performance client/server coordinators on low-cost SoC-FPGA devices for secure IoT data collection. Security is ensured by using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol based on the TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 cipher suite. The hardware architecture of the proposed coordinators is based on SW/HW co-design, implementing within the hardware accelerator core Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication (ECSM), which is the core operation of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC). Meanwhile, the control of the overall TLS scheme is performed in software by an ARM Cortex-A9 microprocessor. In fact, the implementation of the ECC accelerator core around an ARM microprocessor allows not only the improvement of ECSM execution but also the performance enhancement of the overall cryptosystem. The integration of the ARM processor enables to exploit the possibility of embedded Linux features for high system flexibility. As a result, the proposed ECC accelerator requires limited area, with only 3395 LUTs on the Zynq device used to perform high-speed, 233-bit ECSMs in 413 µs, with a 50 MHz clock. Moreover, the generation of a 384-bit TLS handshake secret key between client and server coordinators requires 67.5 ms on a low cost Zynq 7Z007S device

Throughput/Area-Efficient Accelerator of Elliptic Curve Point Multiplication over GF(2233) on FPGA

This paper presents a throughput/area-efficient hardware accelerator architecture for elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM) computation over GF(2233). The throughput of the proposed accelerator design is optimized by reducing the total clock cycles using a bit-parallel Karatsuba modular multiplier. We employ two techniques to minimize the hardware resources: (i) a consolidated arithmetic unit where we combine a single modular adder, multiplier, and square block instead of having multiple modular operators, and (ii) an Itoh–Tsujii inversion algorithm by leveraging the existing hardware resources of the multiplier and square units for multiplicative inverse computation. An efficient finite-state-machine (FSM) controller is implemented to facilitate control functionalities. To evaluate and compare the results of the proposed accelerator architecture against state-of-the-art solutions, a figure-of-merit (FoM) metric in terms of throughput/area is defined. The implementation results after post-place-and-route simulation are reported for reconfigurable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices. Particular to Virtex-7 FPGA, the accelerator utilizes 3584 slices, needs 7208 clock cycles, operates on a maximum frequency of 350 MHz, computes one ECPM operation in 20.59 s, and the calculated value of FoM is 13.54. Consequently, the results and comparisons reveal that our accelerator suits applications that demand throughput and area-optimized ECPM implementations

High Speed and Low-Complexity Hardware Architectures for Elliptic Curve-Based Crypto-Processors

The elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been identified as an efficient scheme for public-key cryptography. This thesis studies efficient implementation of ECC crypto-processors on hardware platforms in a bottom-up approach. We first study efficient and low-complexity architectures for finite field multiplications over Gaussian normal basis (GNB). We propose three new low-complexity digit-level architectures for finite field multiplication. Architectures are modified in order to make them more suitable for hardware implementations specially focusing on reducing the area usage. Then, for the first time, we propose a hybrid digit-level multiplier architecture which performs two multiplications together (double-multiplication) with the same number of clock cycles required as the one for one multiplication. We propose a new hardware architecture for point multiplication on newly introduced binary Edwards and generalized Hessian curves. We investigate higher level parallelization and lower level scheduling for point multiplication on these curves. Also, we propose a highly parallel architecture for point multiplication on Koblitz curves by modifying the addition formulation. Several FPGA implementations exploiting these modifications are presented in this thesis. We employed the proposed hybrid multiplier architecture to reduce the latency of point multiplication in ECC crypto-processors as well as the double-exponentiation. This scheme is the first known method to increase the speed of point multiplication whenever parallelization fails due to the data dependencies amongst lower level arithmetic computations. Our comparison results show that our proposed multiplier architectures outperform the counterparts available in the literature. Furthermore, fast computation of point multiplication on different binary elliptic curves is achieved

Area- Efficient VLSI Implementation of Serial-In Parallel-Out Multiplier Using Polynomial Representation in Finite Field GF(2m)

Finite field multiplier is mainly used in elliptic curve cryptography, error-correcting codes and signal processing. Finite field multiplier is regarded as the bottleneck arithmetic unit for such applications and it is the most complicated operation over finite field GF(2m) which requires a huge amount of logic resources. In this paper, a new modified serial-in parallel-out multiplication algorithm with interleaved modular reduction is suggested. The proposed method offers efficient area architecture as compared to proposed algorithms in the literature. The reduced finite field multiplier complexity is achieved by means of utilizing logic NAND gate in a particular architecture. The efficiency of the proposed architecture is evaluated based on criteria such as time (latency, critical path) and space (gate-latch number) complexity. A detailed comparative analysis indicates that, the proposed finite field multiplier based on logic NAND gate outperforms previously known resultsComment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Reconfigurable elliptic curve cryptography

Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC) have been proposed as an alternative to other established public key cryptosystems such as RSA (Rivest Shamir Adleman). ECC provide more security per bit than other known public key schemes based on the discrete logarithm problem. Smaller key sizes result in faster computations, lower power consumption and memory and bandwidth savings, thus making ECC a fast, flexible and cost-effective solution for providing security in constrained environments. Implementing ECC on reconfigurable platform combines the speed, security and concurrency of hardware along with the flexibility of the software approach. This work proposes a generic architecture for elliptic curve cryptosystem on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that performs an elliptic curve scalar multiplication in 1.16milliseconds for GF (2163), which is considerably faster than most other documented implementations. One of the benefits of the proposed processor architecture is that it is easily reprogrammable to use different algorithms and is adaptable to any field order. Also through reconfiguration the arithmetic unit can be optimized for different area/speed requirements. The mathematics involved uses binary extension field of the form GF (2n) as the underlying field and polynomial basis for the representation of the elements in the field. A significant gain in performance is obtained by using projective coordinates for the points on the curve during the computation process

Hardware Implementations for Symmetric Key Cryptosystems

The utilization of global communications network for supporting new electronic applications is growing. Many applications provided over the global communications network involve exchange of security-sensitive information between different entities. Often, communicating entities are located at different locations around the globe. This demands deployment of certain mechanisms for providing secure communications channels between these entities. For this purpose, cryptographic algorithms are used by many of today\u27s electronic applications to maintain security. Cryptographic algorithms provide set of primitives for achieving different security goals such as: confidentiality, data integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation. In general, two main categories of cryptographic algorithms can be used to accomplish any of these security goals, namely, asymmetric key algorithms and symmetric key algorithms. The security of asymmetric key algorithms is based on the hardness of the underlying computational problems, which usually require large overhead of space and time complexities. On the other hand, the security of symmetric key algorithms is based on non-linear transformations and permutations, which provide efficient implementations compared to the asymmetric key ones. Therefore, it is common to use asymmetric key algorithms for key exchange, while symmetric key counterparts are deployed in securing the communications sessions. This thesis focuses on finding efficient hardware implementations for symmetric key cryptosystems targeting mobile communications and resource constrained applications. First, efficient lightweight hardware implementations of two members of the Welch-Gong (WG) family of stream ciphers, the WG$\left(29,11\right)$ and WG-$16$, are considered for the mobile communications domain. Optimizations in the WG$\left(29,11\right)$ stream cipher are considered when the $GF\left(2^{29}\right)$ elements are represented in either the Optimal normal basis type-II (ONB-II) or the Polynomial basis (PB). For WG-$16$, optimizations are considered only for PB representations of the $GF\left(2^{16}\right)$ elements. In this regard, optimizations for both ciphers are accomplished mainly at the arithmetic level through reducing the number of field multipliers, based on novel trace properties. In addition, other optimization techniques such as serialization and pipelining, are also considered. After this, the thesis explores efficient hardware implementations for digit-level multiplication over binary extension fields $GF\left(2^{m}\right)$. Efficient digit-level $GF\left(2^{m}\right)$ multiplications are advantageous for ultra-lightweight implementations, not only in symmetric key algorithms, but also in asymmetric key algorithms. The thesis introduces new architectures for digit-level $GF\left(2^{m}\right)$ multipliers considering the Gaussian normal basis (GNB) and PB representations of the field elements. The new digit-level $GF\left(2^{m}\right)$ single multipliers do not require loading of the two input field elements in advance to computations. This feature results in high throughput fast multiplication in resource constrained applications with limited capacity of input data-paths. The new digit-level $GF\left(2^{m}\right)$ single multipliers are considered for both the GNB and PB. In addition, for the GNB representation, new architectures for digit-level $GF\left(2^{m}\right)$ hybrid-double and hybrid-triple multipliers are introduced. The new digit-level $GF\left(2^{m}\right)$ hybrid-double and hybrid-triple GNB multipliers, respectively, accomplish the multiplication of three and four field elements using the latency required for multiplying two field elements. Furthermore, a new hardware architecture for the eight-ary exponentiation scheme is proposed by utilizing the new digit-level $GF\left(2^{m}\right)$ hybrid-triple GNB multipliers

Arithmetic Operations in Multi-Valued Logic

This paper presents arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction and multiplications in Modulo-4 arithmetic, and also addition, multiplication in Galois field, using multi-valued logic (MVL). Quaternary to binary and binary to quaternary converters are designed using down literal circuits. Negation in modular arithmetic is designed with only one gate. Logic design of each operation is achieved by reducing the terms using Karnaugh diagrams, keeping minimum number of gates and depth of net in to consideration. Quaternary multiplier circuit is proposed to achieve required optimization. Simulation result of each operation is shown separately using Hspice.Comment: 12 Pages, VLSICS Journal 201