Compact and Programmable yet High-Performance SoC Architecture for Cryptographic Pairings

Cryptographic pairings are important primitives for many advanced cryptosystems. Efficient computation of pairings requires the use of several layers of algorithms as well as optimizations in different algorithm and implementation levels. This makes implementing cryptographic pairings a difficult task particularly in hardware. Many existing hardware implementations fix the parameters of the pairing to improve efficiency but this significantly limits the generality and practicality of the solution. In this paper, we present a compact and programmable yet high-performance architecture for programmable system-on-chip platforms designed for efficient computation of different cryptographic pairings. We demonstrate with real hardware that this architecture can compute optimal ate pairings on a Barreto-Naehrig curve with 126-bit security in 2.18 ms in a Xilinx Zynq-7020 device and occupies only about 3200 slices, 36 DSPs, and 18 BRAMs. We also show that the architecture can support different types of pairings via microcode updates and can be implemented on other reprogrammable devices with very minor modifications.