Parallel Implementation of ECC Point Multiplication on a Homogeneous Multi-Core Microcontroller

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel parallel Elliptic-Curve-Cryptography (ECC) point multiplication implementation over binary Galois Field, GF(2m) by exploiting the advantage of concurrent operation in a homogeneous multi-core processor to yield an improved performance. A modified Lopez-Dahab (LD) mix-coordinates point multiplication algorithm is developed that exploits concurrency and enables operation using parallel instructions. The algorithm is used to implement ECC point multiplication over GF(2^163) on an Xmos multi-core microcontroller. The results obtained show a 60% performance improvement can be achieved over a single core implementation. Our presented implementation is believed to be the first parallel implementation of ECC scalar point multiplication over binary fields on a homogeneous multi-core microcontroller.