International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The research on pairing-based cryptography brought forth a wide range of protocols interesting for future embedded applications. One significant obstacle for the widespread deployment of pairing-based cryptography are its tremendous hardware and software requirements. In this paper we present three side-channel protected hardware/software designs for pairing-based cryptography yet small and practically fast: our plain ARM Cortex-M0+-based design computes a pairing in less than one second. The utilization of a multiply-accumulate instruction-set extension or a light-weight drop-in hardware accelerator that is placed between CPU and data memory improves runtime up to six times. With a 10.1 kGE large drop-in module and a 49 kGE large platform, our design is one of the smallest pairing designs available. Its very practical runtime of 162 ms for one pairing on a 254-bit BN curve and its reusability for other elliptic-curve based crypto systems offer a great solution for every microprocessor-based embedded application.