Salsa20 based lightweight security scheme for smart meter communication in smart grid

The traditional power gird is altering dramatically to a smart power grid with the escalating development of information and communication technology (ICT). Among thousands of electronic devices connected to the grid through communication network, smart meter (SM) is the core networking device. The consolidation of ICT to the electronic devices centered on SM open loophole for the adversaries to launch cyber-attack. Therefore, for protecting the network from the adversaries it is required to design lightweight security mechanism for SM, as conventional cryptography schemes poses extensive computational cost, processing delay and overhead which is not suitable to be used in SM. In this paper, we have proposed a security mechanism consolidating elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Salsa20 stream cipher algorithm to ensure security of the network as well as addressing the problem of energy efficiency and lightweight security solution. We have numerically analyzed the performance of our proposed scheme in case of energy efficiency and processing time which reveals that the suggested mechanism is suitable to be used in SM as it consumes less power and requires less processing time to encrypt or decrypt

A Novel PUF-Based Encryption Protocol for Embedded System On Chip

This paper presents a novel security mechanism for sensitive data stored, acquired or processed by a complex electronic circuit implemented as System-on-Chip (SoC) on an FPGA reconfigurable device. Such circuits are increasingly used in embedded or cyber systems employed in civil and military applications. Managing security in the overarching SoC presents a challenge as part of the process of securing such systems. The proposed new method is based on encrypted and authenticated communications between the microprocessor cores, FPGA fabric and peripherals inside the SoC. The encryption resides in a key generated with Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) circuits and a pseudorandom generator. The conceptual design of the security circuit was validated through hardware implementation, testing and analysis of results

Rotational analysis of ChaCha permutation

We show that the underlying permutation of ChaCha20 stream cipher does not behave as a random permutation for up to 17 rounds with respect to rotational cryptanalysis. In particular, we derive a lower and an upper bound for the rotational probability through ChaCha quarter round, we show how to extend the bound to a full round and then to the full permutation. The obtained bounds show that the probability to find what we call a parallel rotational collision is, for example, less than $2^{-488}$ for 17 rounds of ChaCha permutation, while for a random permutation of the same input size, this probability is $2^{-511}$. We remark that our distinguisher is not an attack to ChaCha20 stream cipher, but rather a theoretical analysis of its internal permutation from the point of view of rotational cryptanalysis

High-level Cryptographic Abstractions

The interfaces exposed by commonly used cryptographic libraries are clumsy, complicated, and assume an understanding of cryptographic algorithms. The challenge is to design high-level abstractions that require minimum knowledge and effort to use while also allowing maximum control when needed. This paper proposes such high-level abstractions consisting of simple cryptographic primitives and full declarative configuration. These abstractions can be implemented on top of any cryptographic library in any language. We have implemented these abstractions in Python, and used them to write a wide variety of well-known security protocols, including Signal, Kerberos, and TLS. We show that programs using our abstractions are much smaller and easier to write than using low-level libraries, where size of security protocols implemented is reduced by about a third on average. We show our implementation incurs a small overhead, less than 5 microseconds for shared key operations and less than 341 microseconds (< 1%) for public key operations. We also show our abstractions are safe against main types of cryptographic misuse reported in the literature

A 16-bit Reconfigurable encryption processor for Pi-Cipher

This paper presents an improved hardware implementation of a 16-bit ARX (Add, Rotate, and Xor) engine for one of the CAESAR second-round competition candidates, Pi-Cipher, implemented on an FPGA. Pi-Cipher is a nonce-based authenticated encryption cipher with associated data. The security of the Pi-Cipher relies on an ARX based permutation function, which is denoted as a Pi-function. The proposed ARX engine has been implemented in just 266 slices, which includes the buffers of the input and the output. It can be clocked at 347 MHz. Also, in this paper, a message processor based on the proposed ARX engine is introduced. The message processor has been implemented in 1114 slices and it can be clocked at 250 MHz. The functionality of the proposed ARX engine was verified on the Xilinx Virtex-7. The new design of the ARX engine allows for almost four times speedup in performance while consuming only 17% larger area than previously published work. We extend our message processor implementation by using parametrized reconfiguration technique after which an area reduction of 27 slices is observed

SAFE-NET: Secure and Fast Encryption using Network of Pseudo-Random Number Generators

We propose a general framework to design a general class of random number generators suit- able for both computer simulation and computer security applications. It can include newly pro- posed generators SAFE (Secure And Fast Encryption) and ChaCha, a variant of Salsa, one of the four finalists of the eSTREAM ciphers. Two requirements for ciphers to be considered se- cure is that they must be unpredictable with a nice distributional property. Proposed SAFE-NET is a network of n nodes with external pseudo-random number generators as inputs nodes, several inner layers of nodes with a sequence of random variates through ARX (Addition, Rotation, XOR) transformations to diffuse the components of the initial state vector. After several rounds of transformations (with complex inner connections) are done, the output layer with n nodes are outputted via additional transformations. By utilizing random number generators with desirable empirical properties, SAFE-NET injects randomness into the keystream generation process and constantly updates the cipher’s state with external pseudo-random numbers during each iteration. Through the integration of shuffle tables and advanced output functions, extra layers of security are provided, making it harder for attackers to exploit weaknesses in the cipher. Empirical results demonstrate that SAFE-NET requires fewer operations than ChaCha while still producing a sequence of uniformly distributed random numbers