Hardware/Software Co-design of Elliptic Curve Cryptography on an 8051 Microcontroller

8-bit microcontrollers like the 8051 still hold a considerable share of the embedded systems market and dominate in the smart card industry. The performance of 8-bit microcontrollers is often too poor for the implementation of public-key cryptography in software. In this paper we present a minimalist hardware accelerator for enabling elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) on an 8051 microcontroller. We demonstrate the importance of removing system-level performance bottlenecks caused by the transfer of operands between hardware accelerator and external RAM. The integration of a small direct memory access (DMA) unit proves vital to exploit the full potential of the hardware accelerator. Our design allows to perform a scalar multiplication over the binary extension field GF(2191 ) in 118 msec at a clock frequency of 12 MHz. Considering performance and hardware cost, our system compares favorably with previous work on similar 8-bit platforms.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CHES
• Authors: Manuel Koschuch, Joachim Lechner, Andreas Weitzer, Johann Großschädl, Alexander Szekely, Stefan Tillich, Johannes Wolkerstorfer
• Keywords: 8-bit Microcontrollers, CHES 2006, Cryptology, Hardware Accelerator, Minimalist Hardware Accelerator