Reconfigurable elliptic curve cryptosystems on a chip

This paper presents a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architecture for Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC) which targets reconfigurable hardware, A four-level partitioning scheme is described for exploring the area and speed trade-offs. A design generator is used to generate parameterisable building blocks for the configurable SoC architecture. A secure web server, which runs on a reconfigurable soft-processor and an embedded hard-processor, shows over 2000 times speedup when the computationally-intensive operations run on the customised building blocks. The embedded on-chip timer block gives accurate performance information. The design factors of configurable SoC architectures are also discussed and evaluated.