An FPGA Implementation of an Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem Coprocessor over Prime Fields

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is an alternative to traditional techniques for public key cryptography. It offers a smaller key size without sacrificing security strength. Previous work found that a hardware implementation of ECC has better performance than the software implementation. Since the performance of a typical elliptic curve cryptosystem is based on the execution time of the encryption/decryption process, hardware can be used to accelerate the computation time of several importance parameters. We propose an efficient field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of the ECC over a prime Galois Field, GF(p). We have designed and synthesized each individual component of the coprocessor for Altera’s Cyclone II FPGA. Experimental results demonstrate that the FPGA implementation can improve the performance of the encryption/decryption process by at least 11.6 times compared to software-based implementation.