Hardware/software co-design of elliptic-curve cryptography for resource-constrained applications

ECC is an asymmetric encryption providing a comparably high cryptographic strength in relation to the key sizes employed. This makes ECC attractive for resource-constrained systems. While pure hardware solutions usually offer a good performance and a low power consumption, they are inflexible and typically lead to a high area. Here, we show a flexible design approach using a 163-bit GF(2m) elliptic curve and an 8-bit processor. We propose improvements to state-of-the-art software algorithms and present innovative hardware/software codesign variants. The proposed implementation offers highly competitive performance in terms of performance and area.