Compact modular multiplier design for strong security capabilities in resource-limited Telehealth IoT devices

Telehealth is an emerging model of delivering quality health to remote communities and stay-at-home users. This is motivated by the rising health care costs and by the benefits of many patients staying at home as opposed to extended hospital stays. Telehealth relies on IoT technology, but IoT devices present the weakest security link to the system. The challenge is to implement strong security capabilities in resource-limited IoT devices. This justifies the use of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) over the other traditional and resource-consumed approaches such as RSA. Efficient modular multiplication is a basic operation needed for ECC systems. Therefore, the compact and efficient implementation of this operation will significantly affect the performance of ECC in resource-limited applications. This work presents a compact serial-in/serial-out word-based systolic implementation of modular multiplication. The proposed structure is derived using a formal and systematic technique for mapping regular iterative algorithms (RIA) onto processor arrays. The proposed methodology enables control of the processor array workload as well as the workload of each processing element. Controlling the processor word size allows control of system speed, latency, and area. The proposed processor structure saves area and energy consumption by a factor up to 96.3% and 98.5%, respectively.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).