Ultra low-power implementation of ECC on the ARM Cortex-M0+

In this work, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is used to make a fast, and very low-power software implementation of a public-key cryptography algorithm on the ARM Cortex-M0+. An optimization of the López-Dahab field multiplication method is proposed, which aims to reduce the number of memory accesses, as this is a slow operation on the target platform. A mixed C and assembly implementation was made; a random point multiplication requires 34.16 μJ, whereas our fixed point multiplication requires 20.63 μJ. Our implementation´s energy consumption beats all other software implementations, on any platform, by a factor of at least 3.3.