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Abstract. We implemented elliptic curve cryptography in the frequency domain on the MSP430 constrained microcontroller. Our implementation of 169-bit elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) on MSP430, one of the most popular microcontrollers for wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes, performs an ECC scalar point multiplication operation, for random points, in only 1.55 ms which is similar to or faster than existing implementations. To our knowledge, this work proposes the first ever software implementation of ECC in the frequency domain on a constrained lowpower microcontroller.

We implement elliptic curve cryptography on the MSP430 which is a commonly used microcontroller in wireless sensor network nodes. We use the number theoretic transform to perform finite field multiplication and squaring as required in elliptic curve scalar point multiplication. We take advantage of the fast Fourier transform for the first time in the literature to speed up the number theoretic transform for an efficient realization of elliptic curve cryptography. Our implementation achieves elliptic curve scalar point multiplication in only 0.65 s and 1.31 s for multiplication of fixed and random points, respectively, and has similar or better timing performance compared to previous works in the literature.

With its relatively small key size, elliptic‐curve cryptography (ECC) is considered as the public‐key cryptographic algorithm of choice for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this work, we implemented ECC in the frequency domain, that is, by using the number theoretic transform, and without using hardware multiplier support, on the constrained MSP430 microcontroller widely used in WSNs. Our 169‐bit ECC implementation uses Edwards curves and performs scalar point multiplication in only 1.97 and 0.98 s for multiplication of random and fixed points, respectively. Unlike many implementations in literature, our implementation does not use hardware multiplier support, which makes it desirable for low‐power applications on constrained WSN platforms. To our knowledge, this study presents the first ever software implementation of ECC in the frequency domain on a constrained low‐power microcontroller without hardware multiplier support. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.