In the last years, the industry has developed and put in the market a plethora of electronic devices that are able to access the Internet and other networks. This is making easier to send, receive, share and store all types of information at any moment, from anywhere. Thus, there is a huge amount of important information crossing the Internet and there are malicious entities and/or individuals trying to capture this information to steal or exploit it in order to obtain financial or strategic gains or to cause damage to other people. There are many ways to protect such information, the most relevant of which is the use of cryptog-raphy. There are many cryptographic algorithms in use nowadays, such as DES, 3DES, AES and RSA, which are usually implemented in software. This leads to low performance, and low security levels for several applications. Therefore, it is necessary to create solutions that provide higher security levels and that at the same time improve cryptography performance. This work proposes and presents a secure communication system that can be inte-grated to embedded devices or computers. The proposed secure communication system developed in this work is based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which is a cryptography scheme that has being studied and improved over the last decade by many researchers and is indicated as one of the most secure among cryptographic algorithms. This work describes in detail the implementation of ECC operations in hardware, trying to provide higher performance than most works available in the literature. Another goal of the work is that even critical embedded systems could use the proposed scheme to build a secure communication system. This work capitalizes on the state of the art in ECC operations and implements these in hardware. The result is a reconfigurable soft IP core for ECC, which can be synthesized for either FPGAs or ASICs. The validation of the soft core comprises the development of a complete communication system that can create a secure communication link between two computers or similar devices using ECC to encrypt all exchanged information. The soft IP core for ECC operations supports any of the five Koblitz curves recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Standards for Efficient Cryptography Group (SECG). However, the IP core can also be easily adapted to support other elliptic curves. An overall secure communication system was developed, implemented and prototyped in a development board with a Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA. Furthermore, the work demonstrates the advantages and gains in performance when compared to software implementations of similar systems.
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