Compiler Assisted Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Although cryptographic implementation tasks are often undertaken by expert programmers, a plethora of performance and security driven options, as well as more mundane software engineering issues, still make this a challenge. In an attempt to transfer expert knowledge into automated tools, we investigate the use of domain specific language and compilation techniques for cryptographic software, focusing on ECC in particular. Specifically, we describe experiments for specialisation of finite field arithmetic from general purpose code, and the description and optimisation of ECC point arithmetic using a cryptography-aware language and compiler. Our main results show that it is possible to allow description of ECC based software in a manner close to the original mathematics, while allowing the automatic production of an executable whose performance is close to that of a hand-optimised implementation.