Abstract
With the rapid advance in communication technology, more and more applications such as e-commerce and wireless networking are becoming possible. Protecting the sensitive information when transmitted on the insecure communication channel is an essential issue in such applications. Public-key cryptography such as the RSA algorithm or elliptic curve cryptography plays a vital role in modern security system, because it can solve the problem of key distribution and possess the signature property. In this thesis we propose an asymmetric crypto-processor (ACP) core. The ACP core can support scalable keys of length up to 2048 bits for both RSA and ECC in GF(p) or GF(2 m ). In order to reduce silicon area, the word-based architecture is adopted in our ACP core. This feature provides a trade-o between security and computation time. Since the original Montgomery's multiplication algorithm needs nal reduction which will decrease the speed, a modi ed Montgomery multiplication is used to eliminate the nal reduction in our datapath. With moderate area overhead, the circuit can achieves an encryption rate of 276 Kbps for 512-bit RSA, 73.3 Kbps for 160-bit ECC in GF(p) and 65.9 Kbps for 160-bit ECC in GF(2 m ), with a 220 MHz clock.