For an equivalent level of security, elliptic curve cryptography uses shorter key sizes and is considered to be an excellent candidate for constrained environments like wireless/mobile communications. In FIPS 186-2, NIST recommends several finite fields to be used in the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). Of the ten recommended finite fields, five are binary extension fields with degrees ranging from 163 to 571. The fundamental building block of the ECDSA, like any ECC based protocol, is elliptic curve scalar mul- tiplication. This operation is also the most computationally intensive. In many situations it may be desirable to accelerate the elliptic curve scalar multiplication with specialized hardware
