High Performance FPGA Implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography over Binary Fields

In this paper, we propose a high performance hardware implementation architecture of elliptic curve scalar multiplication over binary fields. The proposed architecture is based on the Montgomery ladder method and uses polynomial basis for finite field (FF) arithmetic. A single Karatsuba multiplier runs with no idle cycle significantly increases the performance of FF multiplication while spending small amount of hardware resources, and other FF operations performed in parallel with the FF multiplier. The optimized circuits lead to a lesser area requirement compared to other high performance implementations. An implementation for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommended curve with degree 163 is shown, the proposed design can reach 121 MHz with 10,417 slices when implemented on Xilinx Virtex-4 XC4VLX200 FPGA device, the total time required for one elliptic curve scalar multiplication is 9.0 μs.