High performance FPGA based elliptic curve cryptographic co-processor

A high performance elliptic curve coprocessor is developed, which is optimized for a binary field recommended by NIST. The architecture uses a field multiplier capable of performing a field multiplication over the extension field with degree 163 in 0.060 μsec. The coprocessor uses Lopez and Dahab´s projective coordinate system and is optimized specifically for Koblitz curves. An efficient implementation of Itoh and Tsujii´s method for inversion with performance comparable to the extended Euclidean algorithm is used. A prototype of the processor has been implemented for the binary extension field with degree 163 on a Xilinx XCV2000E FPGA. The prototype runs at 66 MHz and performs an elliptic curve scalar multiplication in 0.233 msec on a generic curve and 0.075 msec on a Koblitz curve.