Lookup Table-Based Design of Scalar Multiplication for Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Abstract

This paper is aimed at using a lookup table method to improve the scalar multiplication performance of elliptic curve cryptography. The lookup table must be divided into two polynomials and requires two iterations of point doubling operation, for which negation operations are needed. It is well known that an inversion operation requires a lot of multiplication time. The advantage of this paper is that we are able to reduce one inverse element calculation for this problem and also improve the basic operations of finite fields through segmentation methods. If the normal basis method is used in the design of the inverse element operation, it must be converted to the normal basis through the standard basis. However, the conversion process requires a lot of matrix operations. Though the anti-element operation has good speed performance, it also increases the computational complexity. Using number theory and grouping methods will greatly improve the performance of inverse element operations. With application of the two-time point doubling operation in the hardware implementation, the developed approach reduces the computing time by 48% as compared with the conventional approach. The computational time of the scalar multiplication using the presented method is further improved by 67% over the traditional algorithm with only an area increase of 12%. Finally, the proposed lookup table-based technique can be utilized for software and hardware implementation, as the developed arithmetic operations are simple and are consistent in their execution.

Keywords

• elliptic curve cryptography
• scalar multiplication
• finite field
• point doubling