Tradeoff Design of Low-Cost and Low-Energy Elliptic Curve Crypto-Processor for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a low-cost and low-energy elliptic curves cryptography processor over GF(2m) based solution for security services such as key-distribution and authentication as required for wireless sensor networks was proposed. In order to obtain stronger cryptography as well as to minimize the energy and the cost, the architecture of coprocessor was optimized and implemented based on UMC 0.25μm CMOS technology in different digit size multiplication. The digit size of D is 4 is a reasonable tradeoff compared to the results of implementation. In this case, The coprocessor is able to perform one kP operation over the finite field GF(2^163) in 4.42ms, consuming 38.19μJ when operating frequency is 10MHz. The area is 26,156 equivalent gates. These results indicate that the proposed hardware implementation of ECC would meet the strict energy and cost constraint of a wireless sensor network node.