• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.23 no.12
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• pp.1609-1617
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• 2019

Described in this paper is a design of hardware accelerator for implementing public-key cryptographic protocols (PKCPs) based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and RSA. It supports five elliptic curves (ECs) over GF(p) and three key lengths of RSA that are defined by NIST standard. It was designed to support four point operations over ECs and six modular arithmetic operations, making it suitable for hardware implementation of ECC- and RSA-based PKCPs. In order to achieve small-area implementation, a finite field arithmetic circuit was designed with 32-bit data-path, and it adopted word-based Montgomery multiplication algorithm, the Jacobian coordinate system for EC point operations, and the Fermat's little theorem for modular multiplicative inverse. The hardware operation was verified with FPGA device by implementing EC-DH key exchange protocol and RSA operations. It occupied 20,800 gate equivalents and 28 kbits of RAM at 50 MHz clock frequency with 180-nm CMOS cell library, and 1,503 slices and 2 BRAMs in Virtex-5 FPGA device.