Abstract
This paper presents the silicon chip ECCon, an Elliptic Curve Cryptography processor for application in Radio-Frequency Identification. The circuit is fabricated on a 180 nm CMOS technology. ECCon features small silicon size (15K GE) and has low power consumption (8.57 μW). It computes 163-bit ECC point-multiplications in 296k cycles and has an ISO 18000-3 RFID interface. ECCon’s very low and nearly constant power consumption makes it the first ECC chip that can be powered passively. This major breakthrough is possible because of a radical change in hardware architecture. The ECCon datapath operates on 16-bit words, which is similar to ECC instruction-set extensions. A number of innovations on the algorithmic and on the architectural level substantially increased the efficiency of 163-bit ECC. ECCon is the first demonstration that the proof of origin via electronic signatures can be realized on RFID tags in 180 nm CMOS and below.
Chapter PDF
References
Bock, H., Braun, M., Dichtl, M., Hess, E., Heyszl, J., Kargl, W., Koroschetz, H., Meyer, B., Seuschek, H.: A milestone towards RFID products offering asymmetric authentication based on elliptic curve cryptography. In: Workshop on RFID Security, RFIDsec (2008)
Batina, L., Mentens, N., Sakiyama, K., Preneel, B., Verbauwhede, I.: Low-cost elliptic curve cryptography for wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of Third European Workshop on Security and Privacy in Ad hoc and Sensor Networks (2006)
Feldhofer, M., Dominikus, S., Wolkerstorfer, J.: Strong authentication for RFID systems using the AES algorithm. In: Joye, M., Quisquater, J.-J. (eds.) CHES 2004. LNCS, vol. 3156, pp. 357–370. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Fürbass, F., Wolkerstorfer, J.: ECC processor with low die size for RFID applications. In: Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, ISCAS (2007)
Feldhofer, M., Wolkerstorfer, J., Rijmen, V.: AES implementation on a grain of sand. IEEE Proceedings on Information Security 152, 13–20 (2005)
Großschädl, J., Kamendje, G.-A.: Instruction set extension for fast elliptic curve cryptography over binary finite fields GF(2m). In: Proc. IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors (2003)
Großschädl, J.: Instruction set extension for long integer modulo arithmetic on RISC-based smart cards. In: Proc. 14th Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (2002)
ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC 31. ISO/IEC 18000 Information technology – Radio frequency identification for item management. Technical report, International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland (2004)
Kumar, S., Paar, C.: Are standards compliant elliptic curve cryptosystems feasible on RFID? Printed handout of Workshop on RFID Security (RFIDSec) (July 2006)
Lee, Y.K., Verbauwhede, I.: A compact architecture for montgomery elliptic curve scalar multiplication processor. In: Kim, S., Yung, M., Lee, H.-W. (eds.) WISA 2007. LNCS, vol. 4867, pp. 115–127. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Montgomery, P.L.: Speeding the Pollard and elliptic curve methods of factorization. Mathematics of Computation 48, 243–264 (1987)
National Institute for Standards and Technology. Digital Signature Standard (DSS). Technical report, NIST (January 2000)
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The economic impact of counterfeiting and piracy. Technical report, OECD (2007)
Öztürk, E., Sunar, B., Savaş, E.: Low-power elliptic curve cryptography using scaled modular arithmetic. In: Joye, M., Quisquater, J.-J. (eds.) CHES 2004. LNCS, vol. 3156, pp. 92–106. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Sakiyama, K., Batina, L., Mentens, N., Preneel, B., Verbauwhede, I.: Small-footprint ALU for public-key processors for pervasive security. In: Workshop on RFID Security (2006)
Wolkerstorfer, J.: Is elliptic-curve cryptography suitable to secure RFID tags? In: Workshop on RFID and Lightweight Crypto (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hein, D., Wolkerstorfer, J., Felber, N. (2009). ECC Is Ready for RFID – A Proof in Silicon. In: Avanzi, R.M., Keliher, L., Sica, F. (eds) Selected Areas in Cryptography. SAC 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5381. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04159-4_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04159-4_26
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04158-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04159-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)