Elliptic Curve Cryptography support for ARM based Embedded systems

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is emerging as an attractive approach to public-key cryptography for constrained environments, because of the small key sizes and computational efficiency, while preserving the same security level as the standard methods. The performance of public-key cryptography methods is critical in embedded environments such as applications for wireless, handheld internet devices and smartcards with small memory and strict CPU-latency constraints. Power control is also important for embedded systems as well as security against Differential Power Analysis (DPA). We examined the performance of a set of ECC kernel benchmarks and proposed ISA extensions to support secure and efficient execution, on a ARM processor, which is a very common platform for embedded system applications. An evaluation of possible ARM instruction set extension for Elliptic Curve Cryptography over binary finite fields GF(2m) is presented. With almost no cost at hardware level, we found an average 33% reduction of the total number of dynamically executed instructions. Finally, we analyzed the power requirement to achieve an efficient and secure execution from a power standpoint. Some preliminary results showing the power consumption of the benchmarks are presented.