Hardware/software co-design of an elliptic curve public-key cryptosystem

Abstract

This contribution discusses an implementation of an elliptic curve public-key cryptosystem on the Atmel FPSLIC, a system on a chip (SOC) that integrates a 40 K FPGA with an AVR microcontroller and a set of peripherals. The FPGA is ideally suited for an efficient implementation of the underlying finite field arithmetic. The software benefits the global control. We use a standard basis representation for the field elements and projective coordinates to implement the group operation. The results for area are comparable with existing hardware implementations. Although no attempts have been made yet to reduce the critical path delay of the hardware part, we obtained promising results towards speed and throughput. A clock frequency of 10 MHz is realized, but a lot more must be possible after optimization.