Elliptic Curve Cryptography with Efficiently Computable Endomorphisms and Its Hardware Implementations for the Internet of Things

Verification of an ECDSA signature requires a double scalar multiplication on an elliptic curve. In this work, we study the computation of this operation on a twisted Edwards curve with an efficiently computable endomorphism, which allows reducing the number of point doublings by approximately 50 percent compared to a conventional implementation. In particular, we focus on a curve defined over the 207-bit prime field F
_p
with p = 2
²⁰⁷
- 5,131. We develop several optimizations to the operation and we describe two hardware architectures for computing the operation. The first architecture is a small processor implemented in 0.13 μm CMOS ASIC and is useful in resource-constrained devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The second architecture is designed for fast signature verifications by using FPGA acceleration and can be used in the server-side of these applications. Our designs offer various trade-offs and optimizations between performance and resource requirements and they are valuable for IoT applications.