XTR implementation on reconfigurable hardware

Abstract

Recently, Lenstra and Verheul proposed an efficient cryptosystem called XTR. This system represents elements of Fp*6 with order dividing p2 - p+1 by their trace over Fp2. Compared with the usual representation, this one achieves a ratio of three between security size and manipulated data. Consequently very promising performance compared with RSA and ECC are expected. In this paper, we are dealing with hardware implementation of XTR, and more precisely with Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The intrinsic parallelism of such a device is combined with efficient modular multiplication algorithms to obtain effective implementation(s) of XTR with respect to time and area. We also compare our implementations with hardware implementations of RSA and ECC. This shows that XTR achieves a very high level of speed with small area requirements: an XTR exponentiation is carried out in less than 0.21 ms at a frequency beyond 150 MHz. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2004.