A cryptographic processor for low-resource devices: Canning ECDSA and AES like sardines

Abstract

The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are two of the most popular cryptographic algorithms used worldwide. In this paper, we present a hardware implementation of a low-resource cryptographic processor that provides both digital signature generation using ECDSA and encryption/decryption services using AES. The implementation of ECDSA is based on the recommended double-struck F p192 NIST elliptic curve and AES uses 128-bit keys. In order to meet the low-area requirements, we based our design on a sophisticated hardware architecture where a 16-bit datapath gets heavily reused by all algorithms and the memory is implemented as a dedicated RAM macro. The proposed processor has a total chip area of 21 502 GEs where AES needs only 2 387 GEs and SHA-1 requires 889 GEs. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.