Hardware/software co-design approach for identity-based encryption

Author(s)

Leonardo Scanferla Amaral

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Computação
• Defense date: 09-12-2009

Examining board members

Nahri Balesdent Moreano; Ricardo Dahab

• Advisor: Guido Costa Souza de Araujo

Abstract

Identity-Based Cryptography has been gradually accepted as an effective way of implementing asymmetric cryptography. The calculation of cryptographically-suitable pairings is crucial for the performance of pairing based protocols. In this work we present a comparative study of hardware implementation techniques for computing the r\T pairing over the finite field F3m using a low-cost platform based on then Altera Nios II processor. Using code profiling we identify critical field operations which concentrate most of the execution time; these operations were implemented as specialized FPGA instructions/modules and added to the processor. The specialized processor was synthesized and the application was tailored to the new hardware. Experimental results show that a considerable speedup can be achieved when compared to the baseline software-only approach. Moreover, we show that such Hardware/Software co-design approach is competitive with other solutions (AU)