FPGA Implementation for Elliptic Curve Cryptography Algorithm and Circuit with High Efficiency and Low Delay for IoT Applications

• Published in: Micromachines (Basel) Vol. 14; no. 5; p. 1037
• Main Authors: Wang, Deming, Lin, Yuhang, Hu, Jianguo, Zhang, Chong, Zhong, Qinghua
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 12-05-2023; MDPI
• Subjects: Algorithms; Circuits; Comparative analysis; Computer systems; Cryptography; Curves; Cybersecurity; Digital integrated circuits; Efficiency; elliptic curve cryptography (ECC); Field programmable gate arrays; field-programmable gate array (FPGA); International organizations; Internet of Things; Internet of Things (IoT); Modular units; Montgomery reduction; Network latency; point multiplication; Prime numbers; Software; China; Montgomery reduction; Internet of Things (IoT); point multiplication; field-programmable gate array (FPGA); elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)
• ISSN: 2072-666X; 2072-666X
• DOI: 10.3390/mi14051037

The Internet of Things requires greater attention to the security and privacy of the network. Compared to other public-key cryptosystems, elliptic curve cryptography can provide better security and lower latency with shorter keys, rendering it more suitable for IoT security. This paper presents a high-efficiency and low-delay elliptic curve cryptographic architecture based on the NIST-p256 prime field for IoT security applications. A modular square unit utilizes a fast partial Montgomery reduction algorithm, demanding just a mere four clock cycles to complete a modular square operation. The modular square unit can be computed simultaneously with the modular multiplication unit, consequently improving the speed of point multiplication operations. Synthesized on the Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA platform, the proposed architecture completes one PM operation in 0.08 ms using 23.1 k LUTs at 105.3 MHz. These results show significantly better performance compared to that in previous works.