Highly Efficient Elliptic Curve Crypto-Processor with Parallel GF(2^m) Field Multipliers

Abstract

This study presents a high performance GF(2^m) Elliptic Curve Crypto-processor architecture. The proposed architecture exploits parallelism at the projective coordinate level to perform parallel field multiplications. In the proposed architecture, normal basis representation is used. Comparisons between the Projective, Jacobian and Mixed coordinate systems using sequential and parallel designs are presented. Results show that parallel designs using normal basis gives better area-time complexity (AT²) than sequential designs by 33-252% which leads to a wide range of design tradeoffs. The results also show that mixed coordinate system is the best in both sequential and parallel designs and gives the least number of multiplications levels when using 3 multipliers and the best AT² when using only 2 multipliers.