Better ways to implement a modulo operation (algorithm question)
- by ryxxui
I've been trying to implement a modular exponentiator recently. I'm writing the code in VHDL, but I'm looking for advice of a more algorithmic nature. The main component of the modular exponentiator is a modular multiplier which I also have to implement myself. I haven't had any problems with the multiplication algorithm- it's just adding and shifting and I've done a good job of figuring out what all of my variables mean so that I can multiply in a pretty reasonable amount of time.
The problem that I'm having is with implementing the modulus operation in the multiplier. I know that performing repeated subtractions will work, but it will also be slow. I found out that I could shift the modulus to effectively subtract large multiples of the modulus but I think there might still be better ways to do this. The algorithm that I'm using works something like this (weird pseudocode follows):
result,modulus : integer (n bits) (previously defined)
shiftcount : integer (initialized to zero)
while( (modulus<result) and (modulus(n-1) != 1) ){
modulus = modulus << 1
shiftcount++
}
for(i=shiftcount;i>=0;i++){
if(modulus<result){result = result-modulus}
if(i!=0){modulus = modulus << 1}
}
So...is this a good algorithm, or at least a good place to start? Wikipedia doesn't really discuss algorithms for implementing the modulo operation, and whenever I try to search elsewhere I find really interesting but incredibly complicated (and often unrelated) research papers and publications. If there's an obvious way to implement this that I'm not seeing, I'd really appreciate some feedback.
