A Public-Key Cryptographic Processor for RSA and ECC

We describe a general-purpose processor architecture for accelerating public-key computations on server systems that demand high performance and flexibility to accommodate large numbers of secure connections with heterogeneous clients that are likely to be limited in the set of cryptographic algorithms supported. Flexibility is achieved in that the processor supports multiple public-key cryptosystems, namely RSA, DSA, DH, and ECC, arbitrary key sizes and, in the case of ECC, arbitrary curves over fields GF(p) and GF(2m). At the core of the processor is a novel dual-field multiplier based on a modified carrysave adder (CSA) tree that supports both GF(p) and GF(2m). In the case of a 64-bit integer multiplier, the necessary modifications increase its size by a mere 5%. To efficiently schedule the multiplier, we implemented a multiply-accumulate instruction that combines several steps of a multiple-precision multiplication in a single operation: multiplication, carry propagation, and part...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ASAP
• Authors: Hans Eberle, Nils Gura, Sheueling Chang Shantz, Vipul Gupta, Leonard Rarick, Shreyas Sundaram
• Keywords: Arbitrary Key Sizes, ASAP 2004, General-purpose Processor Architecture, Hardware, Multiple Public-key Cryptosystems