Reconfigurable Architectures for Curve-Based Cryptography on Embedded Micro-Controllers

This paper discusses architectures for embedded security to enable various cryptographic services at low cost. To realize the large bit-lengths and complex arithmetic on an 8-bit embedded micro-controller, several hardware acceleration options for elliptic and hyperelliptic curve cryptography (ECC and HECC) are studied and systematically evaluated. Two key factors influence the performance: one is the communication interface i.e. I/O transfers between processor and co-processor and the other one is the boundary between hardware and software. Our experiments are run on an 8051 and an AVR micro-controller with the crypto co-processors implemented on a FPGA