Exploring the design space of curve-based cryptographic accelerators

Due to its shortest key-length, Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC) is considered as a promising Public Key Cryptography solution for securing future resource-constrained embedded systems. However, its mathematical complexity, compared to the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), is slowing down its standardization. In this paper, we try to fairly explore different hardware architectures of ECC and HECC under the same level of security through parallelizing modular arithmetic layer operations. Speed and cost results of the implemented curve-based cryptographic accelerators showed that without specific optimization, ECC still outperform HECC.