| During the last few years we have seen formidable advances in digital and mobile communication technologies such as cordless and cellular telephones, personal communication systems, Internet connection expansion, etc. The vast majority of digital information used in all these applications is stored and also processed within a computer system, and then transferred between computers via fiber optic, satellite systems, and/or Internet. In all these new scenarios, secure information transmission and storage has a paramount importance in the emerging international information infrastructure, especially, for supporting electronic commerce and other security related services.; The techniques for the implementation of secure information handling and management are provided by cryptography, which can be succinctly defined as the study of how to establish secure communication in an adversarial environment. Among the most important applications of cryptography, we can mention data encryption, digital cash, digital signatures, digital voting, network authentication, data distribution and smart cards.; The security of currently used cryptosystems is based on the computational complexity of an underlying mathematical problem, such as factoring large numbers or computing discrete logarithms for large numbers. These problems, are believed to be very hard to solve. In the practice, only a small number of mathematical structures could so far be applied to build public-key mechanisms. When an elliptic curve is defined over a finite field, the points on the curve form an Abelian group. In particular, the discrete logarithm problem in this group is believed to be an extremely hard mathematical problem. High performance implementations of elliptic curve cryptography depend heavily on the efficiency in the computation of the finite field arithmetic operations needed for the elliptic curve operations.; The main focus of this dissertation is the study and analysis of efficient hardware and software algorithms suitable for the implementation of finite field arithmetic. This focus is crucial for a number of security and efficiency aspects of cryptosystems based on finite field algebra, and specially relevant for elliptic curve cryptosystems. Particularly, we are interested in the problem of how to implement efficiently three of the most common and costly finite field operations: multiplication, squaring, and inversion. |
