MicroBlaze-Based Multiprocessor Embedded Cryptosystem on FPGA for Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication Over Fp

In this paper, we present Microblaze-based parallel architectures of Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication (ECSM) computation for embedded Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC) on Xilinx FPGA. The proposed implementations support arbitrary Elliptic Curve (EC) forms defined over large prime field (F-p) with different security-level sizes. ECSM is performed using Montgomery Power Ladder (MPL) algorithm in Chudnovsky projective coordinates system. At the low abstraction level, Montgomery Modular Multiplication (MMM) is considered as the critical operation. It is implemented within a hardware Accelerator MMM (AccMMM) core based on the modified high radix, r(r = 2(32)) MMM algorithm. The efficiency of our parallel implementations is achieved by the combination of the mixed SW/HW approach with Multi Processor System on Programmable Chip (MPSoPC) design. The integration of multi Micro-Blaze processor in single architecture allows not only the flexibility of the overall system but also the exploitation of the parallelism in ECSM computation with several degrees. The Virtex-5 parallel implementations of 256-bit and 521-bis ECSM computations run at 100 MHZ frequency and consume between 2,739 and 6,533 slices, 22 and 72 RAMs and between 16 and 48 DSP48E cores. For the considered security-level sizes, the delays to perform single ECSM are between 115 ms and 14.72 ms.