On the implementation of a lightweight generic FPGA ECC crypto-core over GF(p)

State-of-the-art implementations of modern embedded computing platforms nowadays often feature reconfigurable components and/or programmable cores. Since these systems are more often connected to a larger network well-thought-out security mechanisms have to be put in place. In order to protect the assets of a (networked) system several security objectives have to be met. By including support for cryptographic operations inside the anyway available programmable chips it is suggested that the overall security level of the system can be raised. In this paper a concept of a lightweight generic FPGA core for performing elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is proposed which underlying arithmetic calculations are solely conducted by a minimalistic arithmetic logic unit based on a single adder/subtracter instance. Due to the utilization of fairly plain algorithms it is well suited for the academic sector and can be seen as a quick guide for implementing cryptographic algorithms on reconfigurable hardware or also as a reference architecture for performing side-channel attacks such as simple/differential power analysis attacks. The main focus of this ongoing research work is the conceptual design, development and implementation of a reconfigurable FPGA-based hardware security module.