A Review on Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Embedded Systems

Importance of Elliptic Curves in Cryptography was independently proposed by Neal Koblitz and Victor Miller in 1985.Since then, Elliptic curve cryptography or ECC has evolved as a vast field for public key cryptography (PKC) systems. In PKC system, we use separate keys to encode and decode the data. Since one of the keys is distributed publicly in PKC systems, the strength of security depends on large key size. The mathematical problems of prime factorization and discrete logarithm are previously used in PKC systems. ECC has proved to provide same level of security with relatively small key sizes. The research in the field of ECC is mostly focused on its implementation on application specific systems. Such systems have restricted resources like storage, processing speed and domain specific CPU architecture.