A 521-bit dual-field elliptic curve cryptographic processor with power analysis resistance

Recently, several hardware implementations for elliptic curve cryptography have been proposed but few of them considered the dual-field functions, real-time requirement, hardware efficiency, and power analysis resistance as a whole. In this paper, a new unified division algorithm and a free pre-computation scheme are introduced to accelerate the GF(p)/GF(2ⁿ) elliptic curve arithmetic functions. The overall hardware is optimized by a very compact Galois field arithmetic unit with the fully pipelined technique. Moreover, a key-blinded technique with regular calculation is designed against the power analysis attacks without degrading clock speed. After fabricated in 90nm CMOS 1P9M process, our ECC processor occupied 0.55mm² can perform the scalar multiplication in 19.2ms over GF(p₅₂₁) and 8.2ms over GF(2⁴⁰⁹), respectively.