Abstract
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the design of custom instructions in a reconfigurable hardware platform dedicated to accelerate arithmetic operations in the binary field \(\mathbb{F}_{{2^{{163}} }} \), using a Gaussian normal basis representation. The resulting platform is capable of running real applications, thus allowing a precise measurement of the execution overheads, and a fair comparison of the hardware and software speedups at several implementation levels. By using this approach, we determine which field operations (e.g., multiplication) are better suited to constrained environments, and which ones provide an enhanced performance in general-purpose systems. Experimental results reveal that by using our fastest field multiplier implemented as a custom instruction in a combined hardware/software approach, we accelerate point multiplication (the fundamental operation in Elliptic Curve Cryptography) over 126 times.













Similar content being viewed by others
References
IEEE Std. 1363–2000, “IEEE Standard Specification for Public-Key Cryptography,” IEEE, 2000. (January)
Altera Corporation, “Nios II Processor Reference Handbook,” 1st edition, Altera Corporation, 2004. (May)
W. Mao, “Modern Cryptography: Theory and Practice,” 1st edition, Prentice Hall, 2003. (July)
M. Rosing, “Implementing Elliptic Curve Cryptography,” Manning Publications, 1998.
A. Menezes, “Elliptic Curve Public Key Cryptosystems,” Kluwer, 1993.
D. Hankerson, A. J. Menezes, and S. Vanstone, “Guide to Elliptic Curve Cryptography,” 1st edition, Springer, 2004. (January)
A. J. Menezes, P. C. Van Oorschot, and S. A. Vanstone, “Handbook of Applied Cryptography,” CRC, 1996. (October)
V. S. Miller, “Use of Elliptic Curves in Cryptography,” in Proc. Crypto’85, 1986, pp. 417–426.
N. Koblitz, “Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems,” Math. Comput., vol. 48, 1987, pp. 203–209.
D. W. Ash, I. F. Blake, and S. A. Vanstone, “Low Complexity Normal Bases,” Discrete Appl. Math., vol. 25, 1989, pp. 191–210.
R. Dahab, D. Hankerson, F. Hu, M. Long, J. López, and A. Menezes, “Software Multiplication using Gaussian Normal Bases,” IEEE Trans. Comput., vol. 55, no. 8, 2006, pp. 974–984. (August)
J. López and R. Dahab, “Fast Multiplication on Elliptic Curves over GF(2m) without pre-computation,” in Proc. of the I Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES), LNCS 1717, 1999, pp. 316–327. (January)
J. López, “A note on Multiplication over GF(2m) using Gaussian Normal Bases,” Manuscript, 2004.
A. Reyhani-Masoleh and M. A. Hasan. “Fast Normal Basis Multiplication Using General Purpose Processors,” in Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC 2001), LNCS 2259, 2001, pp. 230–244.
A. Reyhani-Masoleh and M. A. Hasan, “Fast Normal Basis Multiplication Using General Purpose Processors,” IEEE Trans. Comput., vol. 52, no. 11, 2003, pp. 1379–1390. (November)
J. Groβschaedl and E. Savas, “Instruction Set Extensions for Fast Arithmetic in Finite Fields GF(p) and GF(2m),” in CHES 2004, LNCS 3156, 2004, pp. 133–147.
T. Kerins, E. M. Popovici, W. P. Marnane, and P. Fitzpatrick, “Fully Parameterizable Elliptic Curve Cryptography Processor over GF(2m),” in FPL 2002, LNCS2438, 2002, pp. 750–759.
N. Telle, W. Luk, and R. C. C. Cheung, “Customizing Hardware Designs for Elliptic Curve Cryptography,” in SAMOS 2004, LNCS 3133, 2004, pp. 274–283.
V. Trujillo, J. Velasco, and J. López, “Design of an Elliptic Curve Cryptoprocessor over GF(2163),” in XI Iberchip, 2005. (March)
J. Lutz and A. Hasan, “High Performance FPGA based Elliptic Curve Cryptographic Co-Processor,” in Proc. of the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC 2004), vol. 2, 2004, pp. 486–492.
J. Wolkerstorfer and W. Bauer, “A PCI-Card for Accelerating Elliptic Curve Cryptography,” in Proceedings of Austrochip 2002, 2002.
M. Ernst, M. Jung, F. Madlener, S. Huss, and R. Blümel, “A Reconfigurable System on Chip Implementation for Elliptic Curve Cryptography over GF(2m),” in CHES 2002, LNCS 2523, 2002, pp. 381–399.
S. Tillich and J. Groβschaedl, “A Simple Architectural Enhancement for Fast and Flexible Elliptic Curve Cryptography over Binary Finite Fields GF(2m),” in Proceedings of 9th Asia-Pacific Conference on Advances in Computer Systems Architecture (ACSAC 2004), pp. 282–295, 2004.
K. H. Leung, K. W. Ma, W. K. Wong, and P. H. W. Leong, “FPGA Implementation of a Microcoded Elliptic Curve Cryptographic Processor,” in Proc. of the 2000 IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, 2000, pp. 68–76.
P. Ning and Y. Yin, “Efficient Software Implementation for Finite Field Multiplication in Normal Basis,” in Information and Communications Security 2001. LNCS 2229, 2001, pp. 177–189.
J. López and R. Dahab, “High-speed software multiplication in F(2m),” in INDOCRYPT 2000, LNCS 1977, 2000, pp. 203–212.
N. Gura, S. Shantz, H. Eberle, D. Finchelstein, S. Gupta, V. Gupta, and D. Stebila, “An End-to-End Systems Approach to Elliptic Curve Cryptography,” in CHES 2002, LNCS 2523, 2002, pp. 349–365.
P. Leong and I. Leung, “A Microcoded Elliptic Curve Processor using FPGA Technology,” IEEE Transactions on VLSI, vol. 10, no. 5, 2002, pp. 550–559.
T. Itoh and S. Tsujii, A Fast Algorithm for Computing Multiplicative Inverses in GF(2m) using Normal Bases,” Inf. Comput., vol. 78, no. 3, 1988, pp. 171–177.
W. Diffie and M. E. Hellman, “New Directions in Cryptography,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. IT-22, no. 6, 1976, pp. 644–654.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank FAPESP (Grant 03/11674-0) and CNPq (Grants 55.2117/2002-1 and 30.1731/2003-9) for the financial support to this work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Juliato, M., Araujo, G., López, J. et al. A Custom Instruction Approach for Hardware and Software Implementations of Finite Field Arithmetic over \(\mathbb{F}_{{2^{{163}} }} \) using Gaussian Normal Bases. J VLSI Sign Process Syst Sign Image Video Technol 47, 59–76 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-006-0015-8
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-006-0015-8