Implementation of GF(2m) Elliptic Curve cryptoprocessor on a Nano FPGA

This paper presents an implementation of an Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) cryptoprocessor on a Nano Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Nano FPGAs offer groundbreaking possibilities in power, size, lead-times, operating temperature and cost. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ECC implementation on Nano FPGAs. The proposed ECC cryptoprocessor was modeled using VHDL and synthesized on Actel IGLOO AGLN250V2-VQFP100 Nano FPGA. The synthesis results show that the targeted Nano FPGA can not exceed the values of m ≤ 11 bits. This is because of the limited number of resources available on Nano FPGAs, which opens a new challenging opportunity for future Nano FPGAs to satisfy the needs of critical portable applications. However, these results may be interesting for battery limited applications that require moderate level of security such as those of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN).