Software Implementations of Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a promising alternative for public-key algorithms in resource-constrained systems because it provides a similar level of security with much shorter keys than conventional integer-based publickey algorithms. ECC over binary field is of special interest because the operations in binary field are thought more space and time efficient. However, the software implementations of ECC over binary field are still slow, especially on low-end processors used in small computing devices such as sensor nodes. In this paper, we studied software implementations of ECC. We first investigated whether some architectural parameters such as word size may affect the choice of algorithms when implementing ECC with software. We identified a set of algorithms for ECC implementation for low-end processors. We also examined several improvements to the instruction set architecture of an 8-bit processor and studied their impact on the performance of ECC.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IJNSEC
• Authors: Zhijie Jerry Shi, Hai Yun
• Keywords: Algorithms, Binary Field, IJNSEC 2008, Low-end Processors