Armed with Faster Crypto: Optimizing Elliptic Curve Cryptography for ARM Processors

Elliptic curve cryptography is a widely deployed technology for securing digital communication. It is the basis of many cryptographic primitives such as key agreement protocols, digital signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs. Fast elliptic curve cryptography relies on heavily optimised modular arithm...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2024-02, Vol.24 (3), p.1030
Main Authors: De Smet, Ruben, Blancquaert, Robrecht, Godden, Tom, Steenhaut, Kris, Braeken, An
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
ARM NEON
Cryptography
Curve25519
Data security
extended twisted Edwards curve
Libraries
Multiplication & division
Performance evaluation
Rust
Semiconductor industry
single instruction, multiple data (SIMD)
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Summary:Elliptic curve cryptography is a widely deployed technology for securing digital communication. It is the basis of many cryptographic primitives such as key agreement protocols, digital signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs. Fast elliptic curve cryptography relies on heavily optimised modular arithmetic operations, which are often tailored to specific micro-architectures. In this article, we study and evaluate optimisations of the popular elliptic curve Curve25519 for ARM processors. We specifically target the ARM NEON single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) architecture, which is a popular architecture for modern smartphones. We introduce a novel representation for 128-bit NEON SIMD vectors, optimised for SIMD parallelisation, to accelerate elliptic curve operations significantly. Leveraging this representation, we implement an extended twisted Edwards curve Curve25519 back-end within the popular Rust library "curve25519-dalek". We extensively evaluate our implementation across multiple ARM devices using both cryptographic benchmarks and the benchmark suite available for the Signal protocol. Our findings demonstrate a substantial back-end speed-up of at least 20% for ARM NEON, along with a noteworthy speed improvement of at least 15% for benchmarked Signal functions.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s24031030