A Review of Techniques for Implementing Elliptic Curve Point Multiplication on Hardware

Cryptography is considered indispensable among security measures applied to data concerning insecure means of transmission. Among various existent algorithms on asymmetric cryptography, we may cite Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which has been widely used due to its security level and reduced key sizes. When compared to Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA), for example, ECC can maintain security levels with a shorter key. Elliptic Curve Point Multiplication (ECPM) is the main function in ECC, and is the component with the highest hardware cost. Lots of ECPM implementations have been applied on hardware targeting the acceleration of its calculus. This article presents a systematic review of literature on ECPM implementations on both Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). The obtained results show which methods and technologies have been used to implement ECPM on hardware and present some findings of the choices available to the hardware designers.