Efficient architectures for elliptic curve cryptography processors for RFID

RFID tags will supplant barcodes for product identification in the supply chain. The capability of a tag to be read without a line of sight is its principal benefit, but compromises the privacy of the tag owner. Public key cryptography can restore this privacy. Because of the extreme economic constraints of the application, die area and power consumption for cryptographic functions must be minimized. Elliptic curve processors efficiently provide the cryptographic capability needed for RFID. This paper proposes efficient architectures for elliptic curve processors in GF(2m). One design requires six m-bit registers and six Galois field multiply operations per key bit. The other design requires five m-bit registers and seven Galois field multiply operations per key bit. These processors require a small number of circuit elements and clock cycles while providing protection from simple side-channel attacks. Synthesis results are presented for power, area, and delay in 250, 130 and 90 nm technologies. Compared with prior designs from the literature, the proposed processors require less area and energy. For the B-163 curve, with bit-serial multiplier, the first proposed design synthesized in an IBM low-power 130 nm technology requires an area of 9613 gate equivalents, 163,355 cycles and 4.14 µJ for an elliptic curve point multiplication. The other proposed design requires 8756 gate equivalents, 190,570 cycles and 4.19 µJ.