An FPGA elliptic curve cryptographic accelerator over GF(p)

Abstract

A new FPGA architecture for performing the arithmetic functions needed in elliptic curve cryptographic primitives over GF(p) is presented. The embedded 18×18-bit multipliers and fast carry look-ahead logic located on the Xilinx Virtex2 Pro family of FPGA are used to perform the ordinary multiplications and additions/subtractions required. A 256-bit finite field multiplication, inversion and addition or subtraction can be performed in 0.81 μs, 14.85 μs and 51 ns, respectively. Moreover, a 256-bit elliptic curve scalar point multiplication can be performed in 3.84 ms, using this approach.