Ananyi, Kendall2010-01-122010-01-1220062010-01-12http://hdl.handle.net/1828/2070Exchange of information must integrate a means of protecting data against unauthorized access. Cryptography plays an important role in achieving information security. It is used for (1) encrypting or signing data at the source before transmission, and then (2) decrypting or validating the signature of the received message at the destination. This thesis focuses on the study of the hardware implementation of a reconfigurable processor supporting elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) over prime fields GF(p). The proposed processor can be reconfigured to work with any of the five prime fields recommended by N1ST (192 to 521 bits). Our processor can be programmed to execute any sequence of basic modular operations (add, subtract, multiply, invert) used in higher level ECC arithmetic. The architecture has been prototyped on a Xilinx FPGA. Its performance is competitive with existing hardware implementation, despite the overhead needed to support datapath reconfigurations for different prime sizes.enAvailable to the World Wide Webcomputersaccess controlcryptographyUVic Subject Index::Sciences and Engineering::Applied Sciences::Computer scienceUVic Subject Index::Sciences and Engineering::Engineering::Electrical engineeringThesis