Low-Latency ECDSA Signature Verification-A Road Toward Safer Traffic

Car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure messages exchanged in intelligent transportation systems can reach reception rates over 1000 messages per second. As these messages contain elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) signatures, this puts a very heavy load onto the verification hardware. In fact, the load is so high that, currently, it can only be achieved by implementations running on high-end CPUs and field-programmable gate arrays. These implementations are far from cost-effective or energy efficient. In this paper, we present an application-specified integrated circuit implementation of a dedicated ECDSA verification engine that can reach verification rates of up to 27 000 verifications per second, which is by far the fastest implementation on a single core reported in the literature.