Tradeoff analysis of FPGA based elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

FPGAs are an attractive platform for elliptic curve cryptography hardware. Since field multiplication is the most critical operation in elliptic curve cryptography, we have studied how efficient several field multipliers can be mapped to lookup table based FPGAs. Furthermore we have compared different curve coordinate representations with respect to the number of required field operations, and show how an elliptic curve coprocessor based on the Montgomery algorithm for curve multiplication can be implemented using our generic coprocessor architecture.