A Compact FPGA-Based Application Specific Elliptic Curve Cryptography Over Prime Field

This research targets applications for which compactness is more important than speed. We presented a new reconfigurable data path that enables modular operations for different bit-widths. The FPGA’s dedicated multipliers and carry-chain logic are used to obtain the small data path. It can handle all finite field operations over 256-bit prime fields and all elliptic curves of a specified form. The comparison with other implementations on the same generation of FPGAs learns that our design occupies the smallest area. The results prove that our proposed data path is suitable for a high-performance cryptosystem supporting both RSA and ECC over GF(p).