THE HARDWARE PERFORMANCE OF AUTHENTICATED ENCRYPTION MODES

Abstract Authenticated encryption has long been a vital operation in cryptography by its ability to provide confidentiality, integrity and authenticity at the same time. Its use has progressed in parallel with the worldwide use of Internet Protocol (IP), which has led to development of several new schemes as well as improved versions of existing ones. There have already been studies investigating software performance of various schemes. However, performance of authenticated encryption schemes on hardware has been left as an open question. We study the comprehensive evaluation of hardware performance of the most commonly used authenticated encryption modes CCM, GCM, OCB3 and EAX. These modes are block cipher based with additional authentication data (AAD). In order to make our evaluation fair, we have implemented each scheme with AES block cipher algorithm. In our evaluation, we targeted ASIC platforms and used 45 nm generic NANGATE Open Cell Library for syntheses. In each design, we have targeted minimizing the time-area product while maximizing the throughput. In the results, area, speed, time-area product, throughput, and power figures are presented for each scheme. Finally, we provide an unbiased discussion on the impact of the structure and complexity of each scheme on hardware implementation, together with recommendations on hardware-friendly authenticated encryption scheme design

An IoT Endpoint System-on-Chip for Secure and Energy-Efficient Near-Sensor Analytics

Near-sensor data analytics is a promising direction for IoT endpoints, as it minimizes energy spent on communication and reduces network load - but it also poses security concerns, as valuable data is stored or sent over the network at various stages of the analytics pipeline. Using encryption to protect sensitive data at the boundary of the on-chip analytics engine is a way to address data security issues. To cope with the combined workload of analytics and encryption in a tight power envelope, we propose Fulmine, a System-on-Chip based on a tightly-coupled multi-core cluster augmented with specialized blocks for compute-intensive data processing and encryption functions, supporting software programmability for regular computing tasks. The Fulmine SoC, fabricated in 65nm technology, consumes less than 20mW on average at 0.8V achieving an efficiency of up to 70pJ/B in encryption, 50pJ/px in convolution, or up to 25MIPS/mW in software. As a strong argument for real-life flexible application of our platform, we show experimental results for three secure analytics use cases: secure autonomous aerial surveillance with a state-of-the-art deep CNN consuming 3.16pJ per equivalent RISC op; local CNN-based face detection with secured remote recognition in 5.74pJ/op; and seizure detection with encrypted data collection from EEG within 12.7pJ/op.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication to the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems - I: Regular Paper

AES-CBC Software Execution Optimization

With the proliferation of high-speed wireless networking, the necessity for efficient, robust and secure encryption modes is ever increasing. But, cryptography is primarily a computationally intensive process. This paper investigates the performance and efficiency of IEEE 802.11i approved Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-Rijndael ciphering/deciphering software in Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode. Simulations are used to analyse the speed, resource consumption and robustness of AES-CBC to investigate its viability for image encryption usage on common low power devices. The detailed results presented in this paper provide a basis for performance estimation of AES cryptosystems implemented on wireless devices. The use of optimized AES-CBC software implementation gives a superior encryption speed performance by 12 - 30%, but at the cost of twice more memory for code size.Comment: 8 pages, IEEE 200

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

KALwEN: a new practical and interoperable key management scheme for body sensor networks

Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks (BSNs) pose several challenges–some inherited from wireless sensor networks (WSNs), some unique to themselves–that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new parameterized key management scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports secure global broadcast, local broadcast, and local (neighbor-to-neighbor) unicast, while preserving past key secrecy and future key secrecy (FKS). The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case. With both formal verification and experimental evaluation, our results should appeal to theorists and practitioners alike

AES-Based Authenticated Encryption Modes in Parallel High-Performance Software

Authenticated encryption (AE) has recently gained renewed interest due to the ongoing CAESAR competition. This paper deals with the performance of block cipher modes of operation for AE in parallel software. We consider the example of the AES on Intel\u27s new Haswell microarchitecture that has improved instructions for AES and finite field multiplication. As opposed to most previous high-performance software implementations of operation modes -- that have considered the encryption of single messages -- we propose to process multiple messages in parallel. We demonstrate that this message scheduling is of significant advantage for most modes. As a baseline for longer messages, the performance of AES-CBC encryption on a single core increases by factor 6.8 when adopting this approach. For the first time, we report optimized AES-NI implementations of the novel AE modes OTR, CLOC, COBRA, SILC, McOE-G, POET and Julius -- both with single and multiple messages. For almost all AE modes considered, we obtain a consistent speed-up when processing multiple messages in parallel. Notably, among the nonce-based modes, CCM, CLOC and SILC get by factor 3.7 faster, achieving a performance comparable to GCM (the latter, however, possessing classes of weak keys), with OCB3 still performing at only 0.77 cpb. Among the nonce-misuse resistant modes, McOE-G receives a speed-up by more than factor 4 with a performance of about 1.62 cpb, with COPA consistently performing best at 1.45 cpb

Securing Internet of Things with Lightweight IPsec

Real-world deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require secure communication. It is important that a receiver is able to verify that sensor data was generated by trusted nodes. In some cases it may also be necessary to encrypt sensor data in transit. Recently, WSNs and traditional IP networks are more tightly integrated using IPv6 and 6LoWPAN. Available IPv6 protocol stacks can use IPsec to secure data exchange. Thus, it is desirable to extend 6LoWPAN such that IPsec communication with IPv6 nodes is possible. It is beneficial to use IPsec because the existing end-points on the Internet do not need to be modified to communicate securely with the WSN. Moreover, using IPsec, true end-to-end security is implemented and the need for a trustworthy gateway is removed. In this paper we provide End-to-End (E2E) secure communication between an IP enabled sensor nodes and a device on traditional Internet. This is the first compressed lightweight design, implementation, and evaluation of 6LoWPAN extension for IPsec on Contiki. Our extension supports both IPsec's Authentication Header (AH) and Encapsulation Security Payload (ESP). Thus, communication endpoints are able to authenticate, encrypt and check the integrity of messages using standardized and established IPv6 mechanisms