An Elliptic Curve Cryptography Acceleration Core for OpenVPN on an FPGA Softcore
Niels Versluis (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Arjan van Genderen – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Stephan Wong – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Stjepan Picek – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Tom van Leeuwen – Graduation committee member
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Abstract
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) performance is a major performance bottleneck when serving many VPN clients from a single server on a low-frequency FPGA softcore CPU. Using an area-efficient Elliptic Curve Point (ECP) multiplication accelerator core on the same FGPA, a much higher amount of clients can be served using the same FPGA chip. Using the accelerator core, the obtained speedup ranges from 1.6x in a suboptimal configuration up to 7x with a configuration that maximizes the use of ECC when connecting new clients to the server. In this optimal configuration, the total amount of clients that can be served by a single OpenVPN server increases from 80 in the base case, to 350 in the accelerated case.