FPGA Offloading for Diffie-Hellman Key Exchangeusing Elliptic Curves

Abstract

Cryptographic offloading to hardware is a hot research topic promising accelerated execution time and improved security compared to the software counterpart. However, hardware design and production is a lengthy process which enquires significant financial resources and technical expertise. Our research paper focuses on elliptic curve cryptography, specifically Diffie-Hellman, and on minimizing these deficiencies by highlighting solutions to map this class of algorithms to hardware description. The insights are not limitative and can be equally applied to other cryptographic primitives. The resulting design uses few hardware resources, has low power consumption, is easy to interface with the software and can be implemented on cheap FPGAs. Index Terms—elliptic curves, cryptography, diffie-hellman, FPGA, hardware security, high level synthesi