Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Protocol Implementation Using Picoblaze

Compared to other public key cryptography counterparts like Diffie-Hellman (DH) and Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA), Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is known to provide equivalent level of security with lower number of bits used. Reduced bit usage implies less power and logic area are required to implement this cryptographic scheme. This is particularly important in wireless networks, where a high level of security is required, but with low power consumption. This paper presents the implementation of Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange protocol over GF (2163). The implementation is targeted to Spartan 3AN Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) from Xilinx. The results show that ECDH scalar multiplication can be computed in 1.34 milliseconds, using 4725 of 5888 FPGA slices available in Spartan 3AN. These results confirm the utility of Picoblaze in Elliptic Curve Cryptography.