Hydra: An energy-efficient programmable cryptographic coprocessor supporting elliptic-curve pairings over fields of large characteristics
Journal
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Journal Volume
8639 LNCS
Pages
174-186
Date Issued
2014
Author(s)
Chang, Y.-A.
Hong, W.-C.
Hsiao, M.-C.
Yang, B.-Y.
Wu, A.-Y.
Abstract
Bilinear pairings on elliptic curves have many applications in cryptography and cryptanalysis. Pairing computation is more complicated compared to that of other popular public-key cryptosystems. Efficient implementation of cryptographic pairing, both software- and hardware-based approaches, has thus received increasing interest. In this paper, we focus on hardware implementation and present the design of Hydra, an energy-efficient programmable cryptographic coprocessor that supports various pairings over fields of large characteristics. We also present several implementations of Hydra, among which the smallest only uses 116 K gates when synthesized in TSMC 90 nm standard cell library. Despite the extra programmability, our design is competitive compared even with specialized implementations in terms of time-area-cycle product, a common figure of merit that provides a good measure of energy efficiency. For example, it only takes 3.04 ms to compute an optimal ate pairing over Barreto-Naehrig curves when the chip operates at 200 MHz. This is certainly a very small time-area-cycle product among all hardware implementations of cryptographic pairing in the current literature. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.
SDGs
Other Subjects
Energy efficiency; Product design; Public key cryptography; Security of data; Bilinear pairing; Cryptographic coprocessors; Efficient implementation; Energy efficient; Figure of merits; Hardware implementations; Hardware-based approach; Public-key cryptosystems; Hardware
Type
book