FPGA implementation of an efficient and highly secure cryptoprocessor over Barreto-Naehrig curves

Abstract

Pairings such as Tate, Ate and Optimal-ate are used to perform operations over special form of elliptic curves known as Barreto-Naehrig (BN) curves. Computation of the pairings involve the floating point operations which is difficult to perform and for this purpose special hardware blocks are used. Existing techniques uses Montgomery multiplication algorithm which uses one hardware block corresponding to each operations. This results in increase in the area. Also these hardware blocks take more time to perform these computations. So this paper aims at 1) reducing the computation time of the cryptographic operations and 2) minimizing the hardware blocks required for performing the computations thereby reducing the area. A new dedicated Cryptoprocessor is proposed which consists of a single hardware unit to perform all the operations. The implementation results on a Virtex-4 FPGA device shows that it consumes 23k Slices and computes the tate pairing in 16.475ns.