Efficient FPGA implementation of ECDSA process based on the combination of dual microblaze processor and HW/SW co-design

This paper presents the field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for data transactions in BlockChain networks. In ECDSA, elliptic curve scalar multiplication (ECSM) is considered the critical task. Our optimisation strategy consists of the analysis of these algorithms. The goal is to determine the operations which can be executed in parallel. We propose to split the ECSM and ECDSA algorithms in two parallel computation blocks. Each block integrates one MicroBlaze processor and uses the HW/SW co-design approach. The execution process of ECDSA uses the computation of: i) the finite field arithmetic operations; ii) the true random number generator (TRNG), and iii) the Secure Hash Algorithm. In order to increase the computation throughput, we propose to implement a multi-processor system on programmable chip (MPSoPC), where these operations are integrated in HW. The controls of ECSM and ECDSA are performed in SW. Our MPSoPC generates 24.13 signatures per second.