Evaluating Instruction Set Extensions for Fast Arithmetic on Binary Finite Fields

Binary finite fields GF(2n ) are very commonly used in cryptography, particularly in publickey algorithms such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). On word-oriented programmable processors, field elements are generally represented as polynomials with coefficients from {0, 1}. Key arithmetic operations on these polynomials, such as squaring and multiplication, are not supported by integer-oriented processor architectures. Instead, these are implemented in software, causing a very large fraction of the cryptography execution time to be dominated by a few elementary operations. For example, more than 90% of the execution time of 163-bit ECC may be consumed by two simple field operations: squaring and multiplication. A few processor architectures have been proposed recently that include instructions for binary field arithmetic. However, these have only considered processors with small wordsizes and in-order, single-issue execution. The first contribution of this paper is to validate thes...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ASAP
• Authors: A. Murat Fiskiran, Ruby B. Lee
• Keywords: ASAP 2004, Execution Time, Hardware, Processor Architectures, Superscalar Execution