Accelerating OpenSSL's ECC with low cost reconfigurable hardware

Abstract

Security protocols based on elliptic curves are gradually becoming the standard for a wide range of applications. However, the intensive mathematical computations involved in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), create performance bottlenecks for a number of applications involving web servers, cloud computing infrastructures, and data centers. Side-by-side, software implementations of ECC are plagued with several implementation specific attacks. Reconfigurable hardware accelerators for ECC can solve both these problems. It can provide the necessary speeds to match the performance requirements of the applications, and can also provide an isolated environment, which can prevent several known attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate a reconfigurable hardware accelerator for OpenSSL's implementation of ECC, and show how a low cost hardware platform is sufficient to double performance.