A flexible integrated cryptoprocessor for authentication protocols based on hyperelliptic curve cryptography

An integrated cryptographic processor for public key cryptography for embedded systems is proposed in this contribution. The architecture is designed for computational intensive applications based on hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC) in the automotive domain. Authentication protocols based on HECC can be adapted for access control systems and demobilizer applications in today´s cars. They can raise the security level of these systems, but ask for more computation power than is available in current automotive platforms. Good programmability of the system in high level languages such as C eases the integration of the proposed platform into existing systems and development flows in the automotive domain. In order to include such a level of abstraction a software programmable application specific processor was developed. This processor allows to hide the complex hardware of HECC and avoids a long term hardware development in case of a re-design. The benefit of a software based system combined with a specialized hardware is provided with the described approach. The presented work therefore follows the novel methodology of hardware software codesign where the benefits of both development methodologies are combined in the final system. Experiments show that a substantial gain in computation speed can be achieved while keeping the gate count low.