Enhancement security level and hardware implementation of ECDSA

Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) provides several security services for resource-constrained embedded devices. It can be the target of attacks as Side-channel attacks. The ECDSA level security can be enhanced by tuning several parameters as key size and the security level of each ECDSA elementary modules such as point multiplication, hash function and pseudo random number generators (PRNG). This paper presents conception and hardware implementation of ECDSA taking in consideration requirements related to correlation between key size and security level according to academic and private organizations. In this work, we have considered a key size equal to 233 bit, Montgomery point multiplication technique and hashing functions SHA-224. The ECDSA design is implemented on a reconfigurable hardware platform (Xilinx xc6vlx760-2ff1760). We used the hardware description language VHDL for compartmental validation. The implementation results illustrate security evaluation and hardware performances in terms of time computation and area occupation.