Abstract
8-bit microcontrollers like the 8051 still hold a considerable share of the embedded systems market and dominate in the smart card industry. The performance of 8-bit microcontrollers is often too poor for the implementation of public-key cryptography in software. In this paper we present a minimalist hardware accelerator for enabling elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) on an 8051 microcontroller. We demonstrate the importance of removing system-level performance bottlenecks caused by the transfer of operands between hardware accelerator and external RAM. The integration of a small direct memory access (DMA) unit proves vital to exploit the full potential of the hardware accelerator. Our design allows to perform a scalar multiplication over the binary extension field GF(2191) in 118 msec at a clock frequency of 12 MHz. Considering performance and hardware cost, our system compares favorably with previous work on similar 8-bit platforms.
Keywords
- Elliptic Curve
- Smart Card
- Clock Cycle
- Scalar Multiplication
- Direct Memory Access
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Koschuch, M. et al. (2006). Hardware/Software Co-design of Elliptic Curve Cryptography on an 8051 Microcontroller. In: Goubin, L., Matsui, M. (eds) Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems - CHES 2006. CHES 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4249. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11894063_34
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