A workload characterization of elliptic curve cryptography methods in embedded environments

I. Branovic, R. Giorgi, E. Martinelli
2004 SIGARCH Computer Architecture News  
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is emerging as an attractive public-key system for constrained environments, because of the small key sizes and computational efficiency, while preserving the same security level as the standard methods We have developed a set of benchmarks to compare standard and corresponding elliptic curve public-key methods. An embedded device based on the Intel XScale architecture, which utilizes an ARM processor core was modeled and used for studying the benchmark
more » ... nce. Different possible variations for the memory hierarchy of such basic architecture were considered. We compared our benchmarks with MiBench/Security, another widely accepted benchmark set, to provide a reference for our evaluation. We studied operations and impact on memory of Diffie-Hellman key exchange, digital signature algorithm, ElGamal, and RSA public-key cryptosystems. Elliptic curve cryptosystems are more efficient in terms of execution time, but their impact on memory subsystem has to be taken into account when designing embedded devices in order to achieve better performance. Public key ECC key length Prime field Binary field RSA key length for approximate equivalent security private key length for approximate equivalent security
doi:10.1145/1024295.1024299 fatcat:pc6zcdw5cngohibkugzhf5q5gu