Elliptic Curve Factorization Method: Towards Better Exploitation of Reconfigurable Hardware

Currently, the best known algorithm for factorizing modulus of the RSA public key cryptosystem is the Number Field Sieve. One of its important phases usually combines a sieving technique and a method for checking smoothness of mid-size numbers. For this factorization, the Elliptic Curve Method (ECM) is an attractive solution. As ECM is highly regular and many parallel computations are required, hardware-based platforms were shown to be more cost-effective than software solutions. The few papers dealing with implementation of ECM on FPGA are all based on bit-serial architectures. They use only general-purpose logic and low-cost FPGAs which appear as the best performance/cost solution. This work explores another approach, based on the exploitation of embedded multipliers available in modern FPGAs and the use of high-performances FPGAs. The proposed architecture – based on a fully parallel and pipelined modular multiplier circuit – exhibits a 15-fold improvement over throughput/hardware cost ratio of previously published results.