AREEBA: An Area Efficient Binary Huff-Curve ARchitecture

Abstract

Elliptic curve cryptography is the most widely employed class of asymmetric cryptography algorithm. However, it is exposed to simple power analysis attacks due to the lack of unifiedness over point doubling and addition operations. The unified crypto systems such as Binary Edward, Hessian and Huff curves provide resistance against power analysis attacks. Furthermore, Huff curves are more secure than Edward and Hessian curves but require more computational resources. Therefore, this article has provided a low area hardware architecture for point multiplication computation of Binary Huff curves over GF(2163) and GF(2233). To achieve this, a segmented least significant digit multiplier for polynomial multiplications is proposed. In order to provide a realistic and reasonable comparison with state of the art solutions, the proposed architecture is modeled in Verilog and synthesized for different field programmable gate arrays. For Virtex-4, Virtex-5, Virtex-6, and Virtex-7 devices, the utilized hardware resources in terms of hardware slices over GF(2163) are 5302, 2412, 2982 and 3508, respectively. The corresponding achieved values over GF(2233) are 11,557, 10,065, 4370 and 4261, respectively. The reported low area values provide the acceptability of this work in area-constrained applications.