  Generalised Mersenne Numbers (GMNs) were defined by Solinas in 1999 and
feature in the NIST (FIPS 186-2) and SECG standards for use in elliptic curve
cryptography. Their form is such that modular reduction is extremely efficient,
thus making them an attractive choice for modular multiplication
implementation. However, the issue of residue multiplication efficiency seems
to have been overlooked. Asymptotically, using a cyclic rather than a linear
convolution, residue multiplication modulo a Mersenne number is twice as fast
as integer multiplication; this property does not hold for prime GMNs, unless
they are of Mersenne's form. In this work we exploit an alternative
generalisation of Mersenne numbers for which an analogue of the above property
--- and hence the same efficiency ratio --- holds, even at bitlengths for which
schoolbook multiplication is optimal, while also maintaining very efficient
reduction. Moreover, our proposed primes are abundant at any bitlength, whereas
GMNs are extremely rare. Our multiplication and reduction algorithms can also
be easily parallelised, making our arithmetic particularly suitable for
hardware implementation. Furthermore, the field representation we propose also
naturally protects against side-channel attacks, including timing attacks,
simple power analysis and differential power analysis, which is essential in
many cryptographic scenarios, in constrast to GMNs.
