Lightweight elliptic curve cryptography accelerator for internet of things applications

Authentication, encryption, signatures, and key agreements are public key cryptography (PKC) services required in certain Internet of Things (IoT) applications (such as healthcare, the government, military, etc). Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been suggested as the best alternative for providing these services with notable efficiency. The scalar multiplication (kP) is the main operation in an ECC-based system and also the costliest. For IoT applications, ECC must be carefully implemented so that it meets the application requirements. In this paper a FPGA-based acceleration engine of main ECC operations using binary Edward curves, suitable for use in constrained devices (e.g. the ones in the IoT ecosystem) is presented. As main findings, the proposed design is lightweight and features generality, using less than 1400 slices of Virtex-5 FPGA while providing a security level equivalent to 128-bits. From the literature review provided of related works, the described design has the smallest FPGA hardware requirements. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.