Improvements for High Performance Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem Processor over GF(2^163)

Improvements of the Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC) point multiplication processor is presented in this paper. The main contributions of this paper are the improved finite field multiplier, which uses a 2-stage Karatsuba-Ofman multiplier architecture. Furthermore, a revised algorithm is proposed for the projective to affine coordinate conversion, which computes 2 inversion operations simultaneously with the numerator portion, in order to make better use of parallel cores implemented in the ECC processor. The design is implemented on a Virtex 4 XC4VLX80 FPGA and the implementation results show that the ECC processor can compute a point multiplication in 6.72 us. This time is the fastest to the authors´ best knowledge. Thus, the ECC processor proposed in this paper is suitable for applications where high-throughput is required, such as network servers.