High-speed implementation of an ECC-based wireless authentication protocol on an ARM microprocessor

Abstract

The results of the implementation of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) over the field GF(p) on an 80 MHz, 32-bit ARM microprocessor are presented. A practical software library has been produced which supports variable length implementation of the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). The ECDSA and a recently proposed ECC-based wireless authentication protocol are implemented using the library. Timing results show that the 160-bit ECDSA signature generation and verification operations take around 46 ms and 94 ms, respectively. With these timings, the execution of the ECC-based wireless authentication protocol takes around 140 ms on the ARM7TDMI processor, which is a widely used, low-power core processor for wireless applications.