An RNS Implementation of the Elliptic Curve Cryptography for IoT Security

Public key cryptography plays a vital role in many information and communication systems for secure data transaction, authentication, identification, digital signature, and key management purpose. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is a widely used public key cryptographic algorithm. In this paper, we propose a hardware-software codesign implementation of the ECC cipher. The algorithm is modelled in C language. Compute-intensive components are identified for their efficient hardware implementations. In the implementation, residue number system (RNS) with projective coordinates are utilized for performing the required arithmetic operations. To manage the hardware-software codeign in an integrated fashion Xilinx platform studio tool and Virtex-5 xc5vfx70t device based platform is utilized. An application of the implementation is demonstrated for encryption of text and its respective decryption over prime fields. The design is useful for providing an adequate level of security for IoTs.