• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.1267-1275
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• 2017

This paper describes a design of cryptographic processor supporting 233-bit elliptic curves over binary field defined by NIST. Scalar point multiplication that is core arithmetic in elliptic curve cryptography(ECC) was implemented by adopting modified Montgomery ladder algorithm, making it robust against simple power analysis attack. Point addition and point doubling operations on elliptic curve were implemented by finite field multiplication, squaring, and division operations over $GF(2^{233})$, which is based on affine coordinates. Finite field multiplier and divider were implemented by applying shift-and-add algorithm and extended Euclidean algorithm, respectively, resulting in reduced gate counts. The ECC processor was verified by FPGA implementation using Virtex5 device. The ECC processor synthesized using a 0.18 um CMOS cell library occupies 49,271 gate equivalents (GEs), and the estimated maximum clock frequency is 345 MHz. One scalar point multiplication takes 490,699 clock cycles, and the computation time is 1.4 msec at the maximum clock frequency.