An energy-efficient reconfigurable public-key cryptography processor

Abstract

The ever-increasing demand for security in portable energy-constrained environments that lack a coherent security architecture has resulted in the need to provide energy-efficient algorithm-agile cryptographic hardware. Domain-specific reconfigurability is utilized to provide the required flexibility, without incurring the high overhead costs associated with generic reprogrammable logic. The resulting implementation is capable of performing an entire suite of cryptographic primitives over the integers modulo N, binary Galois fields and nonsupersingular elliptic curves over GF(2/sup n/), with fully programmable moduli, field polynomials and curve parameters ranging in size from 8 to 1024 bits. The resulting processor consumes a maximum of 75 mW when operating at a clock rate of 50 MHz and a 2-V supply voltage. In ultralow-power mode (3 MHz at 0.7 V) the processor consumes at most 525 /spl mu/W. Measured performance and energy efficiency indicate a comparable level of performance to previously reported dedicated hardware implementations, while providing all of the flexibility of a software-based implementation. In addition, the processor is two to three orders of magnitude more energy efficient than optimized software and reprogrammable logic-based implementations.