A Public-Key Cryptographic Processor for RSA and ECC

Overview

This paper describes an extension to a general-purpose processor for accelerating public-key cryptosystems. Supported are the legacy cryptosystems RSA and DH as well as the newly emerging Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) system. As this paper will show, minimal extensions suffice to efficiently support these public-key cryptosystems. Due to its computational efficiency, ECC is emerging as an attractive alternative to traditional public-key cryptosystems such as RSA, DSA, and DH. More specifically, ECC offers equivalent security with smaller key sizes, in less computation time and with less memory.