International Arab Journal of Information Technology (IAJIT), vol. 3, no. 4, October 2006.

 

Fast 160-Bits GF(p) Elliptic Curve Crypto Hardware of High-Radix Scalable Multipliers

 

 

Adnan Abdul-Aziz Gutub

Computer Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia

Email: gutub@kfupm.edu.sa

 

 

Abstract

 

In this paper, a fast hardware architecture for elliptic curve cryptography computation in Galois Field GF(p) is proposed. The architecture is implemented for 160-bits, as its data size to handle. The design adopts projective coordinates to eliminate most of the required GF(p) inversion calculations replacing them with several multiplication operations. The hardware is intended to be scalable, which allows the hardware to compute long precision numbers in a repetitive way. The design involves four parallel scalable multipliers to gain the best speed. This scalable design was implemented in different versions depending on the area and speed. All scalable implementations were compared with an available FPGA design. The proposed scalable hardware showed interesting results in both area and speed. It also showed some area-time flexibility to accommodate the variation needed by different crypto applications.

 

Keywords: Modulo multipliers, Elliptic curve cryptography, Scalable hardware designs