High performance hardware support for elliptic curve cryptography over general prime field

Secure information exchange in resource constrained devices can be accomplished efficiently through elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Due to the high computational complexity of ECC arithmetic, a high performance dedicated hardware architecture is essential to provide sufficient performance in a computation of elliptic curve scalar multiplication. This paper presents a high performance hardware support for elliptic curve cryptography over a prime field GF(p). It exploited a best available possible parallelism of elliptic curve points in projective representation. The proposed hardware for ECC is implemented on Xilinx Virtex-4, Virtex-5 and Virtex-6 FPGAs. A 256-bit scalar multiplication is completed in 2.01  ms, 2.62  ms and 3.91  ms on Virtex-6, Virtex-5 and Virtex-4 FPGA platforms, respectively. The results show that the proposed design is 1.96 times faster with insignificant increase in area consumption as compared to the other reported designs. Therefore, it is a good choice to be used in many ECC based schemes.