A reconfigurable GF(2M) elliptic curve cryptographic coprocessor

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a kind of cryptography that provides the security information services using shorter keys than other known public-key crypto-algorithms without decreasing the security level. This makes ECC a good choice for implementing security services in constrained devices, like the mobile ones. However, the diversity of ECC implementation parameters recommended by international standards has led to interoperability problems among ECC implementations. This work presents the design and implementation results of a novel FPGA coprocessor for ECC than can be reconfigured at run time to support different implementation parameters and hence, different security levels. Regardless there are several related works in the literature, to our knowledge this is the first ECC coprocessor that makes use of a partial reconfigurable methodology to deal with interoperability problems in ECC. A suitable application of the proposed reconfigurable coprocessor is the security protocol IPSec, where the domain parameters for ECC-based cryptographic schemes, like digital signature or encryption, have to be negotiated and agreed upon by the communication partners at run time.