A MicroBlaze specific co-processor for real-time hyperelliptic curve cryptography on Xilinx FPGAs

A Hardware/Software Codesign approach based on a MicroBlaze softcore processor and a GF2ⁿ-coprocessor module to form a minimal hardware architecture for HECC on low-cost Xilinx FPGAs is described in this paper. Exploiting the features of the MicroBlaze's integrated interfaces instructions are streamed on-demand to the coprocessor to keep the controlflow highly flexible. At the same time the dataflow between hardware and software is minimized. Comparison with previous architectures shows high acceleration of HECC with minor increase in hardware resources. It is demonstrated that this speed-up can be used for countermeasures on algorithmic level against basic side-channel attacks while still keeping real-time constraints.