674 research outputs found
Reconfigurable elliptic curve cryptography
Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC) have been proposed as an alternative to other established public key cryptosystems such as RSA (Rivest Shamir Adleman). ECC provide more security per bit than other known public key schemes based on the discrete logarithm problem. Smaller key sizes result in faster computations, lower power consumption and memory and bandwidth savings, thus making ECC a fast, flexible and cost-effective solution for providing security in constrained environments. Implementing ECC on reconfigurable platform combines the speed, security and concurrency of hardware along with the flexibility of the software approach.
This work proposes a generic architecture for elliptic curve cryptosystem on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that performs an elliptic curve scalar multiplication in 1.16milliseconds for GF (2163), which is considerably faster than most other documented implementations. One of the benefits of the proposed processor architecture is that it is easily reprogrammable to use different algorithms and is adaptable to any field order. Also through reconfiguration the arithmetic unit can be optimized for different area/speed requirements. The mathematics involved uses binary extension field of the form GF (2n) as the underlying field and polynomial basis for the representation of the elements in the field. A significant gain in performance is obtained by using projective coordinates for the points on the curve during the computation process
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
Whirlwind: a new cryptographic hash function
A new cryptographic hash function Whirlwind is presented. We give the full specification and explain the design rationale. We show how the hash function can be implemented efficiently in software and give first performance numbers. A detailed analysis of the security against state-of-the-art cryptanalysis methods is also provided. In comparison to the algorithms submitted to the SHA-3 competition, Whirlwind takes recent developments in cryptanalysis into account by design. Even though software performance is not outstanding, it compares favourably with the 512-bit versions of SHA-3 candidates such as LANE or the original CubeHash proposal and is about on par with ECHO and MD6
Hyfs: design and implementation of a reliable file system
Building reliable data storage systems is crucial to any commercial or scientific applications. Modern storage systems are complicated, and they are comprised of many components, from hardware to software. Problems may occur to any component of storage systems and cause data loss. When this kind of failures happens, storage systems cannot continue their data services, which may result in large revenue loss or even catastrophe to enterprises. Therefore, it is critically important to build reliable storage systems to ensure data reliability.
In this dissertation, we propose to employ general erasure codes to build a reliable file system, called HyFS. HyFS is a cluster system, which can aggregate distributed storage servers to provide reliable data service. On client side, HyFS is implemented as a native file system so that applications can transparently run on top of HyFS. On server side, HyFS utilizes multiple distributed storage servers to provide highly reliable data service by employing erasure codes. HyFS is able to offer high throughput for either random or sequential file access, which makes HyFS an attractive choice for primary or backup storage systems.
This dissertation studies five relevant topics of HyFS. Firstly, it presents several algorithms that can perform encoding operation efficiently for XOR-based erasure codes. Secondly, it discusses an efficient decoding algorithm for RAID-6 erasure codes. This algorithm can recover various types of disk failures. Thirdly, it describes an efficient algorithm to detect and correct errors for the STAR code, which further improves a storage system\u27s reliability. Fourthly, it describes efficient implementations for the arithmetic operations of large finite fields. This is to improve a storage system\u27s security. Lastly and most importantly, it presents the design and implementation of HyFS and evaluates the performance of HyFS
Strongly universal string hashing is fast
We present fast strongly universal string hashing families: they can process
data at a rate of 0.2 CPU cycle per byte. Maybe surprisingly, we find that
these families---though they require a large buffer of random numbers---are
often faster than popular hash functions with weaker theoretical guarantees.
Moreover, conventional wisdom is that hash functions with fewer multiplications
are faster. Yet we find that they may fail to be faster due to operation
pipelining. We present experimental results on several processors including
low-powered processors. Our tests include hash functions designed for
processors with the Carry-Less Multiplication (CLMUL) instruction set. We also
prove, using accessible proofs, the strong universality of our families.Comment: Software is available at
http://code.google.com/p/variablelengthstringhashing/ and
https://github.com/lemire/StronglyUniversalStringHashin
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