Efficient implementation of elliptic curve cryptosystems on an ARM7 with hardware accelerator

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient implementation of elliptic curve cryptosystems over a prime field on ARM7 with the help of a hardware accelerator. The hardware accelerator has two dedicated large number arithmetic units (LNAU’s). Three different implementation platforms are considered: ARM7, ARM7 with one LNAU, and ARM7 with two LNAU’s. The time costs for performing point multiplication are measured for all three platforms. On ARM7 with 2 LNAU’s platform, we achieved the point multiplication in 18 ms with the chip running at 50 MHz clock frequency. © 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.