Scalable Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem FPGA Processor for NIST Prime Curves

The architecture and the implementation of a high-performance scalable elliptic curve cryptography processor (ECP) are presented. The proposed ECP is able to support all five prime field elliptic curves recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The design takes advantage of the high-performance capabilities of the DSP48E slices available in Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to achieve high speed and low hardware resource utilization. The proposed design parallelizes the underlying prime field operations to reduce the latency of the elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM) operation. Prime field inversion is performed efficiently using the same arithmetic blocks as the ones used for prime field multiplication and addition/subtraction. To the best of the authors´ knowledge, the proposed scalable ECP is the fastest and smallest ECP that can support all five NIST recommended prime curves without the need to reconfigure the hardware. It can compute the ECPM between 1.709 and 28.04 ms using a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA.