ECC on Your Fingertips: A Single Instruction Approach for Lightweight ECC Design in GF(p)

Lightweight implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography on FPGA has been a popular research topic due to the boom of ubiquitous computing. In this paper we propose a novel single instruction based ultra-light ECC crypto-processor coupled with dedicated hard-IPs of the FPGAs. We show that by using the proposed single instruction framework and using the available block RAMs and DSPs of FPGAs, we can design an ECC crypto-processor for NIST curve P-256, requiring only 81 and 72 logic slices on Virtes-5 and Spartan-6 devices respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation of ECC which requires less than 100 slices on any FPGA device family.