Division in GF(p) for application in elliptic curve cryptosystems on field programmable logic

Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC) are becoming increasingly popular for use in mobile devices and applications where bandwidth and chip area are limited. They provide much higher levels of security per key bit than established public key systems such as RSA. The coreECCoperation of point scalar multiplication inGF(p) requires modular multiplication, division/inversion and addition/subtraction. Division is the most costly operation in terms of speed and is often avoided by performing many extra multiplications. This paper proposes a new divider architecture and FPGA implementations for use in an ECC processor.