Circuit and method for decompressing compressed elliptic curve points

摘要

An elliptic curve (EC) processor circuit (120) comprising a finite field arithmetic logic unit (122), operation registers (124) an EC control unit (123) and a register file (127). A storage element (250) is coupled to the finite field arithmetic logic unit (122). The EC control unit (123) controls the various components of the EC processor circuit (120) to decompress a compressed one-bit representation of a Y coordinate of an elliptic curve point (X, Y). The EC control unit (123) controls the use of the operation register (124), the storage element (250) and the finite field arithmetic logic unit (122) to recursively compute the decompressed version of the compressed Y coordinate based upon the X coordinate and the compressed one-bit representation of the Y coordinate. The circuit and method employ minimal additional hardware and processing in an EC processor circuit (120).