Reconfigurable processor for public-key cryptography

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel processor architecture that provides a reconfigurable computing platform for modular exponentiation used in RSA and Diffle-Hellman public-key cryptography. The processor can operate autonomously to perform all operations required for modular exponentiation. A parallel-processing pipeline offers the versatility to perform any large-integer arithmetic. The processor can perform modular exponentiation using classical exponentiation, Montgomery multiplication and Barrett reduction. Hardware exponent receding is used to improve the efficiency of square-and-multiply algorithms by 15%. The performance of the processor is competitive in comparison to fixed functionality hardware implementations and is significantly faster than general purpose public-key cryptographic processors previously reported in the literature.