Unified Compact ECC-AES Co-Processor with Group-Key Support for IoT Devices in Wireless Sensor Networks

Security is a critical challenge for the effective expansion of all new emerging applications in the Internet of Things paradigm. Therefore, it is necessary to define and implement different mechanisms for guaranteeing security and privacy of data interchanged within the multiple wireless sensor networks being part of the Internet of Things. However, in this context, low power and low area are required, limiting the resources available for security and thus hindering the implementation of adequate security protocols. Group keys can save resources and communications bandwidth, but should be combined with public key cryptography to be really secure. In this paper, a compact and unified co-processor for enabling Elliptic Curve Cryptography along to Advanced Encryption Standard with low area requirements and Group-Key support is presented. The designed co-processor allows securing wireless sensor networks with independence of the communications protocols used. With an area occupancy of only 2101 LUTs over Spartan 6 devices from Xilinx, it requires 15% less area while achieving near 490% better performance when compared to cryptoprocessors with similar features in the literature

An Outline of Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Threats, Countermeasures and Implementations

With the expansion of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the need for securing the data flow through these networks is increasing. These sensor networks allow for easy-to-apply and flexible installations which have enabled them to be used for numerous applications. Due to these properties, they face distinct information security threats. Security of the data flowing through across networks provides the researchers with an interesting and intriguing potential for research. Design of these networks to ensure the protection of data faces the constraints of limited power and processing resources. We provide the basics of wireless sensor network security to help the researchers and engineers in better understanding of this applications field. In this chapter, we will provide the basics of information security with special emphasis on WSNs. The chapter will also give an overview of the information security requirements in these networks. Threats to the security of data in WSNs and some of their counter measures are also presented

Cryptography for Ultra-Low Power Devices

Ubiquitous computing describes the notion that computing devices will be everywhere: clothing, walls and floors of buildings, cars, forests, deserts, etc. Ubiquitous computing is becoming a reality: RFIDs are currently being introduced into the supply chain. Wireless distributed sensor networks (WSN) are already being used to monitor wildlife and to track military targets. Many more applications are being envisioned. For most of these applications some level of security is of utmost importance. Common to WSN and RFIDs are their severely limited power resources, which classify them as ultra-low power devices. Early sensor nodes used simple 8-bit microprocessors to implement basic communication, sensing and computing services. Security was an afterthought. The main power consumer is the RF-transceiver, or radio for short. In the past years specialized hardware for low-data rate and low-power radios has been developed. The new bottleneck are security services which employ computationally intensive cryptographic operations. Customized hardware implementations hold the promise of enabling security for severely power constrained devices. Most research groups are concerned with developing secure wireless communication protocols, others with designing efficient software implementations of cryptographic algorithms. There has not been a comprehensive study on hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms tailored for ultra-low power applications. The goal of this dissertation is to develop a suite of cryptographic functions for authentication, encryption and integrity that is specifically fashioned to the needs of ultra-low power devices. This dissertation gives an introduction to the specific problems that security engineers face when they try to solve the seemingly contradictory challenge of providing lightweight cryptographic services that can perform on ultra-low power devices and shows an overview of our current work and its future direction

Public key cryptography in resource-constrained WSN

In this paper we present a detailed review of the works on public key cryptography (PKC) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the early days of sensor networks, public key cryptography was thought to be completely unfeasible considering its computational complexity and energy requirements. By this time, several works have proved that the lightweight versions of many well-known public key algorithms can be utilized in WSN environment. With the expense of a little energy, public key based schemes could in fact be the best choice for ensuring data security in high-security demanding WSN applications. Here, we talk about the notion of public key cryptography in WSN, its applicability, challenges in its implementation, and present a detailed study of the significant works on PKC in WSN

Efficient Implementation on Low-Cost SoC-FPGAs of TLSv1.2 Protocol with ECC_AES Support for Secure IoT Coordinators

Security management for IoT applications is a critical research field, especially when taking into account the performance variation over the very different IoT devices. In this paper, we present high-performance client/server coordinators on low-cost SoC-FPGA devices for secure IoT data collection. Security is ensured by using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol based on the TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 cipher suite. The hardware architecture of the proposed coordinators is based on SW/HW co-design, implementing within the hardware accelerator core Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication (ECSM), which is the core operation of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC). Meanwhile, the control of the overall TLS scheme is performed in software by an ARM Cortex-A9 microprocessor. In fact, the implementation of the ECC accelerator core around an ARM microprocessor allows not only the improvement of ECSM execution but also the performance enhancement of the overall cryptosystem. The integration of the ARM processor enables to exploit the possibility of embedded Linux features for high system flexibility. As a result, the proposed ECC accelerator requires limited area, with only 3395 LUTs on the Zynq device used to perform high-speed, 233-bit ECSMs in 413 µs, with a 50 MHz clock. Moreover, the generation of a 384-bit TLS handshake secret key between client and server coordinators requires 67.5 ms on a low cost Zynq 7Z007S device