Point halving, being faster than doubling, is also used to perform fast scalar multiplications on generic elliptic curves over binary fields. Since its computation is more expensive than that of the Frobenius, halving was thought to be uninteresting for Koblitz curves. At PKC 2004, Avanzi, Ciet, and Sica combined Frobenius operations with one point halving to compute scalar multiplications on Koblitz curves using on average 14\% less group additions than with the usual $\tau$-and-add method without increasing memory usage. The second result of this paper is an improvement over their expansion, that is simpler to compute, and optimal in a suitable sense, i.e.\ it has minimal Hamming weight among all $\tau$-adic expansions with digits $\{0,\pm1\}$ that allow one halving to be inserted in the corresponding scalar multiplication algorithm. The resulting scalar multiplication requires on average 25\% less group operations than the Frobenius method, and is thus 12.5\% faster than the previous known combination.
Category / Keywords: implementation / elliptic curve cryptosystem, koblitz curves, scalar multiplication, point halving Date: received 12 Jul 2005 Contact author: roberto avanzi at gmail com Available formats: PDF | BibTeX Citation Version: 20050712:201552 (All versions of this report) Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion