Implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems on a reconfigurable computer

During the last few years, a considerable effort has been devoted to the development of reconfigurable computers, machines that are based on the close interoperation of traditional microprocessors and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Several prototype machines of this type have been designed, and demonstrated significant speedups compared to conventional workstations for computationally intensive problems, such as codebreaking. Nevertheless, the efficient use and programming of such machines is still an unresolved problem. In this paper, we demonstrate an efficient implementation of an Elliptic Curve scalar multiplication over GF(2^m), using one of the leading reconfigurable computers available on the market, SRC-6E. We show how the hardware architecture and programming model of this reconfigurable computer has influenced the choice of the algorithm partitioning strategy for this application. A detailed analysis of the control, data transfer, and reconfiguration overheads is given in the paper, together with the performance comparison of our implementation against an optimized microprocessor implementation.