Low-latency digit-serial dual basis multiplier for lightweight cryptosystems

Various cryptosystems, such as elliptic curve and pairing-based cryptosystems, in resource-constrained security applications rely on finite field multiplication. For applications such as these, a digit-serial multiplier has the potential features to achieve a trade-off between space and time complexities. The authors propose an efficient decomposition of the multiplication into four independent sub-multiplication units to facilitate parallel processing, which is additionally facilitated by the systolic structures of the sub-multiplication units. The proposed architecture uses a four-bit scheme to construct a novel processing element, instead of using only one bit as is currently used in similar multipliers. The results of the synthesis show that the proposed digit-serial dual basis multiplier eliminates up to 96% of the critical path delay.