FPGA Implementation of High-Speed Area-Efficient Processor for Elliptic Curve Point Multiplication Over Prime Field

Abstract

Developing a high-speed elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC) processor that performs fast point multiplication with low hardware utilization is a crucial demand in the fields of cryptography and network security. This paper presents field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of a high-speed, low-area, side-channel attacks (SCAs) resistant ECC processor over a prime field. The processor supports 256-bit point multiplication on recently recommended twisted Edwards curve, namely, Edwards25519, which is used for a high-security digital signature scheme called Edwards curve digital signature algorithm (EdDSA). The paper proposes novel hardware architectures for point addition and point doubling operations on the twisted Edwards curve, where the processor takes only 516 and 1029 clock cycles to perform each point addition and point doubling, respectively. For a 256-bit key, the proposed ECC processor performs single point multiplication in 1.48 ms, running at a maximum clock frequency of 177.7 MHz in a cycle count of 262 650 with a throughput of 173.2 kbps, utilizing only 8873 slices on the Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA platform, where the points are represented in projective coordinates. The implemented design is time-area-efficient as it offers fast scalar multiplication with low hardware utilization without compromising the security level.

Keywords

• Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)
• elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM)
• twisted Edwards curve
• side-channel attacks (SCAs)
• field-programmable gate array (FPGA)