Efficient Elliptic Curve Arithmetic for Lightweight Cryptographic Schemes for IoT Applications

The Internet of Things’ (IoT) market is expected to grow exponentially at the global level in the coming years, due to the proliferation of more reliable and faster networks resulting from the extensive rollout of 5 to 10 G mobile networks. By 2025, it is expected that worldwide projection of IoT connected devices will be pegged at 30.9 billion units. Despite the potential benefits of the new technology, security in IoT is a major threat. According to HP, 70% of IoT devices are vulnerable to sniffing attacks and reliable solution is yet to be found. The standard cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and AES provide good security but their utilization in IoT is questionably due to hardware and energy constraints for computationally expensive encryption schemes. However, elliptic curve- based cryptography, a recent paradigm in public key cryptography, achieves the same level of security with smaller key sizes. On the other hand, the total score of performance of an elliptic curve-based cryptosystem depends largely on the efficiency of the arithmetic operations performed in it. It is against this background that this paper proposes efficient elliptic curve arithmetic for implementing ECC based schemes suitable for IoT systems implementations. Elliptic curve point arithmetic implementations in projective coordinate systems over binary extension fields introduce higher efficiencies in software. In this regard, this paper has proposed an improved López-Dahab point arithmetic methods on non-supersingular elliptic curves over . The results show 69.20% improvement in Point Doubling, 44.68% in Point Addition and the scalar point multiplication execution time is decreased by 48.80%.