Versatile Hardware Framework for Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Abstract

We propose versatile hardware framework for ECC. The framework supports arithmetic operations over P-256, Ed25519 and Curve25519 curves, enabling easy implementation of various ECC algorithms. Framework finds its application area e.g. in FIDO2 attestation or in nowadays rapidly expanding field of hardware wallets. As the design is intended to be ASIC-ready, we designed it to be area efficient. Hardware units are reused for calculations in several finite fields, and some of them are superior to previously designed circuits in terms of time-area product. The framework implements several attack countermeasures. It enables implementation of certain countermeasures even in later stages of design. The design was validated on SoC FPGA.