On Parallelization of High-Speed Processors for Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Parallelization of scalable elliptic curve cryptosystem processors in GF(2m)

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN's) are resource constrained networks, demanding energy efficient cryptographic algorithms in order to extend security to them. When compared with the popular RSA algorithm, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) offers similar level of security with smaller key size requirements. An efficient implementation of ECC heavily relies on the scalar multiplication operation. An efficient method for the elliptic curve point multiplication operation is proposed and its resource requirements are compared with binary and non-adjacent form (NAF) techniques. While comparing these, addition and doubling operations are considered. The proposed scalar multiplication technique makes use of both affine and projective coordinate systems while carrying out addition and doubling operations. The number of computations required to perform these operations is compared and an appropriate coordinate system is chosen for each of the operations.

Elliptic curves cryptography was introduced independently by Victor Miller (Miller, 1986) and Neal Koblitz (Koblitz, 1987(Koblitz, ) in 1985. .At that time elliptic curve cryptography was not actually seen as a promising cryptographic technique.As time progress and further research and intensive development done especially on the implementation side, elliptic curve cryptography is now being implemented widely.Elliptic curves cryptography offers smaller key size, bandwidth savings and faster in implementations when compared to the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptography which based its security on the integer factorization problem.The most interesting feature of the elliptic curves is the group structure of the points generated by the curves, where points on the elliptic curves form a group.The security of elliptic curves cryptography relies on the elliptic curves discrete logarithm problem.The elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem is analogous to the ordinary algebraic discrete logarithm problem, l = g x , where given the l and g, it is infeasible to compute the x.Elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem deals with solving for n the relation P = nG.Given the point P and the point G, then it is very hard to find the integer n.To implement the discrete logarithm problem in elliptic curve cryptography, the main task is to compute the order of group of the curves or in other words the number of points on the curve.Computation to find the number of points on a curve, has given rise to several point counting algorithms.The Schoof and the SEA (Schoof-Elkies-Atkin) point counting algorithms will be part of the discussion in this chapter.This chapter is organized as follows: Section 2, gives some preliminaries on elliptic curves, and in section 3, elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem is discussed.Some relevant issues on elliptic curve cryptography is discussed in section 4, in which the Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme, ElGamal elliptic curve cryptosystem and elliptic curve digital signature scheme are discussed here accompanied with some examples.Section 5 discussed the two point counting algorithms, Schoof algorithm and the SEA (Schoof-Elkies-Atkin) algorithm.Following the discussion in section 5, section 6 summaries some similarities and the differences between these two algorithms.Section 7 gives some brief literature on these two point counting algorithms.Finally, section 8 is the concluding remarks for this chapter. Elliptic curvesElliptic curves obtained their name from their relation to elliptic integrals that arise from the computation of the arc length of ellipses (Lawrence & Wade, 2006).Elliptic curves are www.intechopen.com Cryptography and Security in Computing1 1 2 3 4 2 2 4 Fig. 1.1. 2(1 ) (1 ) yx x x   www.intechopen.com

This paper introduces the ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) processor, in which the τ-NAF converter and Square-Square-Add Algorithm are utilized, for point multiplication on Koblitz curves. The proposed ECC processor operates over GF(2163). The τ-NAF converter can turn the complicated point double to simple point square, and the Square-Square-Add Algorithm can decrease the number of point addition. With the proposed design, the execution time for executing point multiplication will decrease by 21%, and the AT value (Area-Time product) will be lowered by 15% than the state-of-the-art design, which achieves better efficiency on the execution of ECC over Koblitz curves.

Elliptic curve signature schemes offer shorter signatures compared to other methods and a family of curves called Koblitz curves can be used for reducing the cost of signing and verification. This paper presents an FPGA implementation designed specifically for rapid verification of self-certified identity based signatures using Koblitz curves. Verification requires computation of three elliptic curve point multiplications which are computed efficiently with 3-term multiple point multiplication and joint sparse form. Certain improvements to precomputations associated with multiple point multiplications are introduced. It is shown that, when using parallel processors, it is possible to gain considerable increases in the number of operations per second by allowing slightly longer computation times for single operations. It is demonstrated that up to 166,000 verifications per second can be computed using a single Altera Stratix II FPGA.

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.

Elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) was proposed by Miller [10] and Koblitz [9] which relies on the difficulty of elliptic curve discrete logarithmic problem (ECDLP). It is gaining wide acceptance as an alternative to the conventional public key cryptosystem such as RSA [24], DSA [25], DH [26]. Also it is noted that the wireless sensor networks (WSN) based on the rapid progress of wireless communications and embedded micro electro mechanical systems technologies are becoming important part in our daily life. The security of the WSN becomes one of the major concerns in its applications. Even ECC prominently offers great potential benefits for WSN security there is still a lot of work needs to be done due to WSN has very restraint running conditions such as limited energy source, capability of computing, etc. It is well known that scalar multiplication operation in ECC accounts for about 80% of key calculation time on wireless sensor network motes. In this paper we present an optimized dynamic window based on our previous research works. The whole quality of service (QoS) has been improved under this algorism in particularly the power consuming is more efficiently. The simulation results showed that the average calculation time, due to fuzzy conditions decreased from previous 26 to current 9 as a whole the calculation time, decreased by approximately 18% in comparison to our previous algorithms in an ECC wireless sensor network [23].

Typically, commercial sensor nodes are equipped with MCUsclocked at a low-frequency (i.e., within the 4–12 MHz range). Consequently, executing cryptographic algorithms in those MCUs generally requires a huge amount of time. In this respect, the required energy consumption can be higher than using a separate accelerator based on a Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that is switched on when needed. In this manuscript, we present the design of a cryptographic accelerator suitable for an FPGA-based sensor node and compliant with the IEEE802.15.4 standard. All the embedded resources of the target platform (Xilinx Artix-7) have been maximized in order to provide a cost-effective solution. Moreover, we have added key negotiation capabilities to the IEEE 802.15.4 security suite based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC;. Our results suggest that tailored accelerators based on FPGA can behave better in terms of energy than contemporary software solutions for motes, such as the TinyECC and NanoECC libraries. In this regard, a point multiplication (PM) can be performed between 8.58- and 15.4-times faster, 3.40- to 23.59-times faster (Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman, ECDH) and between 5.45- and 34.26-times faster (Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme, ECIES). Moreover, the energy consumption was also improved with a factor of 8.96 (PM).

The use of public-key cryptosystems (PKC) received considerable attention. They are beneficial in encryption as well as signing which play an essential role in electronic banking and financial transactions. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is one of best public key techniques because of its small key size and high security. Secure applications in smart cards present implementation challenges particular to the platform's memory, bandwidth, and computation constraints. ECC's unique properties make it especially well suited to smart card applications. ECC systems provide the highest strength per bit of any cryptosystem known today. The paper presents a new method for smart card implementation of elliptic curves, explaining how ECC can not only significantly reduce the cost, but also accelerate the deployment of smart cards in new applications. ECC permits reductions in key and certificate size that translate to smaller memory requirements (especially for EEPROM), which represent significant cost savings. This added functionality can play an effective role in electronic payment and online banking technologies.

An elliptic curve point multiplier (ECPM) is the main part of all elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) systems and its performance is decisive for the performance of the overall cryptosystem. A VLSI residue number system (RNS) architecture of an ECPM is presented in this paper. In the proposed approach, the necessary mathematical conditions that need to be satisfied, in order to replace typical finite field circuits with RNS ones, are investigated. It is shown that such an application is feasible and that it leads to a significant improvement in the execution time of a scalar point multiplication.

In this digital world, communication systems have witnessed abundant usage of media over the platforms. Among these, providing security in transmission of images is highly important, and attained a lot of research interest due to its high consideration in both the industry and the academic community. This paper proposes a hybrid asymmetric image encryption algorithm using Elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC), Hadamard transform and Hill cipher algorithms. Based on the Diffie–Hellman public key exchange method a point on the elliptic curve is selected and agreed between both the sender and receiver. The key relies upon the ECC and it is difficult to resolve the ECDLP to get it. The proposed algorithm involves two stages of encryption, primarily, the XOR function is applied on the Elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) shared secret key and the hadamard image. In the subsequent stage, ECC is combined with the hill cipher algorithm. Encryption and decryption uses self-invertible key matrix, hence the process of finding inverse key becomes redundant during decryption which improves the speed of execution. It also enhances the security and efficiency compared to original hill cipher method. The results are compared with other ECC methods proves that the current cryptosystem attains large key space, highly key sensitive, low correlation and can resist against differential and statistical attacks.

Wireless sensor networks facilitate real-time data processing in many applications such as intrusion detection and military surveillance. These applications inherently demand a high level of security. Public key cryptographic techniques such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) provide a flexible interface to ensure security, requiring no pre-distribution of keys. However, ECC is very compute-intensive, owing to the computationally complex elliptic curve point multiplication operation. This work presents a technique to speed up the elliptic curve point multiplication operation, achieving a cost reduction of about 48% over the double and add algorithm and about 40% over the width-w Non Adjacent Form (NAF) algorithm. Additionally, results of its software implementation are also presented, simulating the specifications of MEMSIC's wireless sensor network development kit. Finally, we conclude that the timing results obtained from the software implementation conform to the theoretical results.

An elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) is one of public key cryptosystem, whose security is based on elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). An elliptic curve is uniquely determined by mathematical parameters such as j-invariant of an elliptic curve. By giving trace of elliptic curve, t, a definition field \(\mathbb F_{p}\), and discriminant D, an elliptic curve with order \(\sharp {E(\mathbb F_{p})} = n\) is determined. Therefore it is an open problem to determine explicit relations between the mathematical parameters and the embedding degrees k. Hirasawa and Miyaji presented concrete relations between the mathematical parameters and the embedding degrees. In this research, a new explicit relation between elliptic-curve parameters and embedding degrees is investigated by generalizing their research.

A dual-core high-performance processor for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in GF( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${p}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) over Generic Weierstrass Curves was presented in this brief. Firstly, an optimized radix-128 Montgomery modular multiplication algorithm was proposed. It takes 6 clock cycles to calculate modular multiplication, which promotes the speed of elliptic curve point-addition (PA) and elliptic curve point-doubling (PD). Secondly, a dual-core hardware architecture which includes PD core and PA core to calculate elliptic curve point-multiplication (PM) was developed. It can speed up the PM by adopting parallelism with different levels and optimizing the scheduling. Finally, a data transfer architecture between PA and PD cores was proposed which requires only a 1024-bit register. It improves the speed of PM. The proposed design consumes 996k gates and compute the PM in 0.017 ms on ASIC with a 90 nm standard cell library. Moreover, the proposed design is also implemented on FPGA (Virtex-6 platform), which consumes 182k LUTs and compute the PM in 0.056 ms.

A promising direction for constructing cryptographically stable pseudo-random sequence generators is an application of transformations in a group of points of elliptic and hypereliptic curves. This will allow building evidence-stable crypto algorithms, the problem of finding the private key in which is associated with solving a theoretically complex elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. This paper proposes a method for generating pseudo-random sequences of the maximal period using transformations on elliptic curves. This method consists in the application of recurrent transformations with sequential formation of elements of points group of elliptic curves. This allows providing the maximum period of pseudo-random sequences with the reduction of the problem of finding the private key to the solution of the theoretically complex elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. The block diagram of the device for generating pseudo-random sequences and the scheme for generating the internal states of the generator are given. We also present the results of statistical testing of some generators, which show that the generated sequences are indistinguishable in a statistical sense from truly random ones.KeywordsPseudo-random sequencesElliptic curvesMaximum period