Information Technology Journal

ISSN 1812-5638

© 2006 Asian Network for Scientific Information

High Performance Elliptic Curve GF(2^m) Crypto-processor

Turki F. Al-Somani, M. K. Ibrahim* and Adnan Gutub

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

*De Montfort University, School of Engineering and Technology, Leicester LE19BH, UK

Abstract: This study presents a high performance elliptic curve cryptoprocessor architecture over GF(2^m). The proposed architecture exploits parallelism at the projective coordinate level to perform parallel field multiplications. Comparisons between the Projective, Jacobian and Lopez-Dahab coordinate systems using sequential and parallel designs are presented. Results show that parallel designs gives better area-time complexity (AT²) than sequential designs by 44-252% which leads to a wide range of design tradeoffs. The results also show that the Projective coordinate system gives the best AT² in parallel designs with the least number of multiplications levels when using 4 multipliers.

Key words: Elliptic curves cryptosystems, projective coordinate, parallel designs, normal basis