Twisted Edwards-Form Elliptic Curve Cryptography for 8-bit AVR-based Sensor Nodes

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) pose a number of unique security challenges that demand innovation in several areas including the design of cryptographic primitives and protocols. Despite recent progress, the efficient implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for WSNs is still a very active research topic and techniques to further reduce the time and energy cost of ECC are eagerly sought. This paper presents an optimized ECC implementation that we developed from scratch to comply with the severe resource constraints of 8-bit sensor nodes such as the MICAz and IRIS motes. Our ECC software uses Optimal Prime Fields (OPFs) as underlying algebraic structure and supports two different families of elliptic curves, namely Weierstraß-form and twisted Edwards-form curves. Due to the combination of efficient field arithmetic and fast group operations, we achieve an execution time of 5.8*10^6 clock cycles for a full 158-bit scalar multiplication on an 8-bit ATmega128 microcontroller, which is 2.78 times faster than the widely-used TinyECC library. Our implementation also shows that the energy cost of scalar multiplication on a MICAz (or IRIS) mote amounts to just 19 mJ when using a twisted Edwards curve over a 160-bit OPF. This result compares fairly well with the energy figures of two recently-presented hardware designs of ECC based on twisted Edwards curves

MoTE-ECC: Energy-Scalable Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are susceptible to a wide range of malicious attacks, which has stimulated a body of research on "light-weight" security protocols and cryptographic primitives that are suitable for resource-restricted sensor nodes. In this paper we introduce MoTE-ECC, a highly optimized yet scalable ECC library for Memsic's MICAz motes and other sensor nodes equipped with an 8-bit AVR processor. MoTE-ECC supports scalar multiplication on Montgomery and twisted Edwards curves over Optimal Prime Fields (OPFs) of variable size, e.g. 160, 192, 224, and 256 bits, which allows for various trade-offs between security and execution time (resp. energy consumption). OPFs are a special family of "low-weight" prime fields that, in contrast to the NIST-specified fields, facilitate a parameterized implementation of the modular arithmetic so that one and the same software function can be used for operands of different length. To demonstrate the performance of MoTE-ECC, we take (ephemeral) ECDH key exchange between two nodes as example, which requires each node to execute two scalar multiplications. The first scalar multiplication is performed on a fixed base point (to generate a key pair), whereas the second scalar multiplication gets an arbitrary point as input. Our implementation uses a fixed-base comb method on a twisted Edwards curve for the former and a simple ladder approach on a birationally-equivalent Montgomery curve for the latter. Both scalar multiplications require about 9*10^6 clock cycles in total and occupy only 380 bytes in RAM when the underlying OPF has a length of 160 bits. We also describe our efforts to harden MoTE-ECC against side-channel attacks (e.g. simple power analysis) and introduce a highly regular implementation of the comb method

Low-Weight Primes for Lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptography on 8-bit AVR Processors

Small 8-bit RISC processors and micro-controllers based on the AVR instruction set architecture are widely used in the embedded domain with applications ranging from smartcards over control systems to wireless sensor nodes. Many of these applications require asymmetric encryption or authentication, which has spurred a body of research into implementation aspects of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) on the AVR platform. In this paper, we study the suitability of a special class of finite fields, the so-called Optimal Prime Fields (OPFs), for a "lightweight" implementation of ECC with a view towards high performance and security. An OPF is a finite field Fp defined by a prime of the form p = u*2^k + v, whereby both u and v are "small" (in relation to 2^k) so that they fit into one or two registers of an AVR processor. OPFs have a low Hamming weight, which allows for a very efficient implementation of the modular reduction since only the non-zero words of p need to be processed. We describe a special variant of Montgomery multiplication for OPFs that does not execute any input-dependent conditional statements (e.g. branch instructions) and is, hence, resistant against certain side-channel attacks. When executed on an Atmel ATmega processor, a multiplication in a 160-bit OPF takes just 3237 cycles, which compares favorably with other implementations of 160-bit modular multiplication on an 8-bit processor. We also describe a performance-optimized and a security-optimized implementation of elliptic curve scalar multiplication over OPFs. The former uses a GLV curve and executes in 4.19M cycles (over a 160-bit OPF), while the latter is based on a Montgomery curve and has an execution time of approximately 5.93M cycles. Both results improve the state-of-the-art in lightweight ECC on 8-bit processors

A Family of Lightweight Twisted Edwards Curves for the Internet of Things

We introduce a set of four twisted Edwards curves that satisfy common security requirements and allow for fast implementations of scalar multiplication on 8, 16, and 32-bit processors. Our curves are defined by an equation of the form -x^2 + y^2 = 1 + dx^2y^2 over a prime field Fp, where d is a small non-square modulo p. The underlying prime fields are based on "pseudo-Mersenne" primes given by p = 2^k - c and have in common that p is congruent to 5 modulo 8, k is a multiple of 32 minus 1, and c is at most eight bits long. Due to these common features, our primes facilitate a parameterized implementation of the low-level arithmetic so that one and the same arithmetic function is able to process operands of different length. Each of the twisted Edwards curves we introduce in this paper is birationally equivalent to a Montgomery curve of the form -(A+2)y^2 = x^3 + Ax^2 + x where 4/(A+2) is small. Even though this contrasts with the usual practice of choosing A such that (A+2)/4 is small, we show that the Montgomery form of our curves allows for an equally efficient implementation of point doubling as Curve25519. The four curves we put forward roughly match the common security levels of 80, 96, 112 and 128 bits. In addition, their Weierstraß representations are isomorphic to curves of the form y^2 = x^3 - 3x + b so as to facilitate inter-operability with TinyECC and other legacy software

FourQ on Embedded Devices with Strong Countermeasures Against Side-Channel Attacks

This work deals with the energy-efficient, high-speed and high-security implementation of elliptic curve scalar multiplication, elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange and elliptic curve digital signatures on embedded devices using FourQ and incorporating strong countermeasures to thwart a wide variety of side-channel attacks. First, we set new speed records for constant-time curve-based scalar multiplication, DH key exchange and digital signatures at the 128-bit security level with implementations targeting 8, 16 and 32-bit microcontrollers. For example, our software computes a static ECDH shared secret in 6.9 million cycles (or 0.86 seconds @8MHz) on a low-power 8-bit AVR microcontroller which, compared to the fastest Curve25519 and genus-2 Kummer implementations on the same platform, offers 2x and 1.4x speedups, respectively. Similarly, it computes the same operation in 496 thousand cycles on a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller, achieving a factor-2.9 speedup when compared to the fastest Curve25519 implementation targeting the same platform. A similar speed performance is observed in the case of digital signatures. Second, we engineer a set of side-channel countermeasures taking advantage of FourQ\u27s rich arithmetic and propose a secure implementation that offers protection against a wide range of sophisticated side-channel attacks, including differential power analysis (DPA). Despite the use of strong countermeasures, the experimental results show that our FourQ software is still efficient enough to outperform implementations of Curve25519 that only protect against timing attacks. Finally, we perform a differential power analysis evaluation of our software running on an ARM Cortex-M4, and report that no leakage was detected with up to 10 million traces. These results demonstrate the potential of deploying FourQ on low-power applications such as protocols for the Internet of Things

Fast ECDH Key Exchange Using Twisted Edwards Curves with an Efficiently Computable Endomorphism

It is widely accepted that public-key cryptosystems play a major role in the security arena of the Internet of Things (IoT), but they need to be implemented efficiently to not deplete the scarce resources of battery-operated devices such as wireless sensor nodes. This paper describes a highly-optimized software implementation of scalar multiplication for Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange on resource-limited IoT devices that achieves fast execution times along with reasonably small code size and RAM consumption. Our software uses a special class of elliptic curves, namely twisted Edwards curves with an efficiently computable endomorphism similar to that of the so- called Gallant-Lambert-Vanstone (GLV) curves. This allows us to combine the main advantage of the GLV model, which is an efficiently-computable endomorphism to speed up variable-base scalar multiplication, with the fast and complete addition rules of the (twisted) Edwards model. We implemented variable-base scalar multiplication for static ECDH on two such curves, one over a 159-bit and the second over a 207-bit pseudo-Mersenne prime field, respectively, and evaluated their execution time on a 16-bit MSP430F1611 processor. The arithmetic operations in the prime field do not contain operand-dependent conditional statements (in particular no "if-then-else" clauses) and also the scalar multiplication follows a fixed execution path for a given (static) scalar. A variable-base scalar multiplication on curves over the 159 and 207-bit field takes about 2.63 and 4.84 million clock cycles, respectively, on an MSP430F1611 processor. These results compare favorably with the Montgomery ladder on the equivalent Montgomery curves, which is almost 50% slower

Efficient Implementation of Pedersen Commitments Using Twisted Edwards Curves

Cryptographic commitment schemes are used in many contexts, whereby the size of the secret data and the security requirements depend on the target application. Using a software library that has been designed for other purposes (e.g., key-exchange or digital signatures) to compute commitments can be complicated or inefficient. We present in this paper a flexible implementation of Pedersen commitments based on elliptic curves in twisted Edwards form. The implementation supports a set of five curves of varying cryptographic strength, which are defined over 127, 159, 191, 223, and 255-bit pseudo-Mersenne prime fields. One can dynamically (i.e., at runtime) choose one of the curves according to the required level of security, and it is also possible to adapt to the size of the data to be committed by varying the number of base points. The point arithmetic is performed with optimized formulas using extended coordinates and dynamically pre-computed tables are utilized to speed up the scalar multiplication. Our implementation is written in ANSI C (with optional x86 assembler optimizations for the field arithmetic) and was compiled and tested successfully with Visual C on Windows, gcc on Linux, and clang on macOS. We present detailed benchmarking results for the field and point arithmetic on all five curves. When using an Intel Core i7 processor clocked at 2.7 GHz as test platform, we can compute more than 38,000 commitments per second on a twisted Edwards curve over a 127-bit field

Types of lightweight cryptographies in current developments for resource constrained machine type communication devices: challenges and opportunities

Machine-type communication devices have become a vital part of the autonomous industrial internet of things and industry 4.0. These autonomous resource-constrained devices share sensitive data, and are primarily acquired for automation and to operate consistently in remote environments under severe conditions. The requirements to secure the sensitive data shared between these devices consist of a resilient encryption technique with affordable operational costs. Consequently, devices, data, and networks are made secure by adopting a lightweight cryptosystem that should achieve robust security with sufficient computational and communication costs and counter modern security threats. This paper offers in-depth studies on different types and techniques of hardware and software-based lightweight cryptographies for machine-type communication devices in machine-to-machine communication networks