Designing an ASIP for Cryptographic Pairings over Barreto-Naehrig Curves

Abstract. This paper presents a design-space exploration of an applicationspecific instruction-set processor (ASIP) for the computation of various cryptographic pairings over Barreto-Naehrig curves (BN curves). Cryptographic pairings are based on elliptic curves over finite fields--in the case of BN curves a field Fp of large prime order p. Efficient arithmetic in these fields is crucial for fast computation of pairings. Moreover, computation of cryptographic pairings is much more complex than elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) in general. Therefore, we facilitate programming of the proposed ASIP by providing a C compiler. In order to speed up Fp arithmetic, a RISC core is extended with additional scalable functional units. Because the resulting speedup can be limited by the memory throughput, utilization of multiple data-memory banks is proposed. The presented design needs 15.8 ms for the computation of the Optimal-Ate pairing over a 256-bit BN curve at 338 MHz implemented with a 130 n...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CHES
• Authors: David Kammler, Diandian Zhang, Dominik Auras, Gerd Ascheid, Hanno Scharwächter, Markus Langenberg, Peter Schwabe, Rudolf Mathar
• Keywords: 256-bit Bn Curve, CHES 2009, Cryptographic Pairings, Cryptography, Various Cryptographic Pairings