A novel memory architecture for elliptic curve cryptography with parallel modular multipliers

Abstract

Parallelization of operations is of utmost importance for efficient implementations of public key cryptography algorithms. Taking a clarification of parallelization methods at different abstraction levels of public key algorithms as a foundation, we propose a novel memory architecture for elliptic curve implementations with multiple modular multiplier units. This architecture is well-suited for different algorithms over GF(P) to be implemented on FPGAs. It allows the execution time to scale with the number of modular multipliers and features nearly no overhead compared to the mere runtime of the multipliers. The advantages of this distributed memory architecture is demonstrated by means of two different EC point multiplications algorithms