An efficient many-core architecture for Elliptic Curve Cryptography security assessment

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a popular tool to construct public-key crypto-systems. The security of ECC is based on the hardness of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). Implementing and analyzing the performance of the best known methods to solve the ECDLP is useful to assess the security of ECC and choose security parameters in practice. We present a novel many-core hardware architecture implementing the parallel version of Pollard's rho algorithm to solve the ECDLP. This architecture results in a speed-up of almost 300% compared to the state of the art and we use it to estimate the monetary cost of solving the Certicom ECCp-131 challenge using FPGAs. © 2015 Imperial College.