ACryp-Proc: Flexible Asymmetric Crypto Processor for Point Multiplication

Flexibility is one of the driving agents for 5G architecture development to incorporate enhanced mobile broad band, machine type communication (MTC), and ultra-reliable MTC. While considering flexibility in the domain of security/reliability, we present a unified and flexible hardware architecture, implementing point multiplication algorithm for both elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Binary Huff Curves (BHC). The proposed architecture can be used in the scenarios where the users can tradeoff between the algorithmic execution time and different reliability/security levels. To establish an area overhead for the unified design, dedicated architectures for ECC and BHC over the GF(2
^m
) field are implemented in the first step and compared with state-of-the-art. Then, a unified architecture for ECC and BHC is implemented. The performance results of proposed unified architecture illustrate the trade-off between execution time and security level.