Elliptic Curve Cryptography on FPGA for Low-Power Applications

Elliptic curve cryptography has generated a lot of research interest due to its ability to provide greater security per bit compared to public key systems such as RSA. The designer of an elliptic curve hardware accelerator is faced with many choices at design time, each of which can impact the performance of the accelerator in different ways. There are many examples in the literature of how these design choices can effect the area and/or speed of an elliptic curve hardware accelerator. The effect of design choices on power and energy consumption in elliptic curve hardware has been less well studied. This article studies the effect of design choices on the power and energy consumption of an FPGA-based reconfigurable elliptic curve hardware accelerator. A reconfigurable processor has been used for different system parameters and the power and energy consumption measured. The power and energy results are presented and compared.