A modular design of elliptic-curve point multiplication for resource constrained devices

Abstract

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is a good candidate for protecting secret data on resource constrained devices. FPGA-based implementations of its main operation, i.e., scalar point multiplication, have gained popularity for their apparent speed advantage over the software counterparts. This paper presents a simple design of point multiplication that minimizes the occupied FPGA resources while maintaining an acceptable timing performance. This is achieved by employing Montgomery ladder algorithm in the projective field, simplest arithmetic units and optimized schedule for the operations. Due to the modular design approach adopted, our design can be easily adapted to different implementation requirements.