SOFTWARE/HARDWARE CO-DESIGN OF MODULAR EXPONENTIATION FOR EFFICIENT RSA CRYPTOSYSTEM

Abstract

This paper presents an implementation of Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA) cryptosystem based on hardware/software (HW/SW) co-design. The main operation of RSA is the modular exponentiation (ME) which is performed by repeated modular multiplications (MMs). In this work, the right-to-left (R2L) algorithm is used for the implementation of the ME as a programmable system on chip (PSoC). The processor MicroBlaze of Xilinx is used for flexibility. The R2L method is often suggested to improve the timing performance, since it is based on parallel computations of MMs. However, if the optimization of HW resources is a constraint, this method can be executed sequentially using a single modular multiplier as a custom intellectual property (IP). Consequently, the execution time of the ME becomes dependent of three factors, namely the capability of the custom IP to perform the MMs, the nonzero bit string of the exponent and the communication link between the processor and the custom IP. In order to achieve the best trade-off between area, speed and flexibility, we propose three implementations in this work. The first one is a pure software solution. The second one takes benefit of a HW accelerator dedicated to the MM execution. The last one is based on a dual strategy. Two parallel MMs are implemented within a custom IP and local memories are used close to the arithmetic units to minimize the communication link influence. The results show that in the application to RSA 1024-bits, the ME runs in 22,25 ms, while using only 1,848 slices.