Design of a low-power asynchronous elliptic curve cryptography coprocessor

The current evolution of mobile devices and networked pervasive computer systems, such as wireless sensor networks, demand more and more functionality while consuming a minimum amount of energy. Security is one important need within such networked systems. With respect to this, the asynchronous design style is an accepted way of hardening crypto-cores against side-channel attacks. In this paper, we show a case study of designing a low-power asynchronous processor for elliptic-curve-cryptography. Therefore, we provide the theoretical base of this crypto-technique and a description about the applied designflow. For the evaluation, a layout has been created and compared with a synchronous implementation. The results show that even for a larger asynchronous implementation the power consumption is only one third of the synchronous one.