Implementation Aspects of Elliptic Curve CryptographyE. SavasPh.D. Thesis, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Oregon State University, June 20, 2000AbstractAs the information-processing and telecommunications revolutions now underway will continue to change our life styles in the rest of the 21st century, our personal and economic lives rely more and more on our ability to transact over the electronic medium in a secure way. The privacy, authenticity, and integrity of the information transmitted or stored on networked computers must be maintained at every point of the transaction. Fortunately, cryptography provides algotrithms and techniques for keeping information secret, for determining that the contents of a transaction has not been tampered with, for determining who has really authorized the transaction, and for binding the involved parties with the contents of the transaction. Since we need security on every piece of digital equipment that helps conduct transactions over the internet in the near future, space and time performances of cryptographic algorithms will always remain to be among the most critical aspects of implementing cryptographic functions.A major class of cryptographic algorithms comprises public-key schemes which enable to realize the message integrity and authenticity check, key distribution, digital signature functions etc. An important category of public-key algorithms is that of elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC). One of the major advantages of elliptic curve cryptosystems is that they utilize much shorter key lengths in comparison to other well known algorithms such as RSA cryptosystems. However, as do the other public-key cryptosystems ECC also requires computationally intensive operations. Although the speed remains to be always the primary concern, other design constraints such as memory might be of significant importance for certain constrained platforms. In this thesis, we are interested in developing space- and time-efficient hardware and software implementations of the elliptic curve cryptosystems. The main focus of this work is to improve and devise algorithms and hardware architectures for arithmetic operations of finite fields used in elliptic curve cryptosystems. Firstly, we proposed hardware and software solutions for Montgomery arithmetic operations (mainly, multiplication and inversion) and developed the idea of dual-field artihmetic unit. Secondly, we deal with software implementation problems of composite field arithmetic and composite field conversion methods. And finally, we proposed a practical solution to elliptic curve generation over finite fields GF(p), which is usually considered as very difficult implementation problem. |