Small footprint ALU for public-key processors for pervasive security

Abstract

Abstract. The field of embedded systems is constantly growing and new applications are emerging. Extreme examples are RFID tags and sensor nodes as they put new requirements on implementations of Public Key (PK) algorithms with a very low budget for the number of gates, power, bandwidth etc. This work describes a low-cost Modular Arithmetic Logic Unit (MALU) for Elliptic/Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC/HECC) suitable for these applications. Our best solution for the MALU supporting ECC field arithmetic features 2 171 gates with an average power consumption of less than 40 µW in a 0.25 µm CMOS technology. This result is obtained by hardware resource sharing of the datapath and the usage of composite fields for ECC. Key Words: pervasive computing, Elliptic/Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography, composite fields, low-power hardware implementations