A new bit-serial architecture for field multiplication using polynomial bases

Abstract

Multiplication is the main finite field arithmetic operation in elliptic curve cryptography and its bit-serial hardware implementation is attractive in resource constrained environments such as smart cards, where the chip area is limited. In this paper, a new serial-output bit-serial multiplier using polynomial bases over binary extension fields is proposed. It generates a bit of the multiplication in each clock cycle with the latency of one cycle. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a serial-output bit-serial multiplier architecture using polynomial bases for general irreducible polynomials is proposed. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.