Accelerated V2X provisioning with Extensible Processor Platform

Abstract

With the burgeoning Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, security and privacy concerns are paramount. Such concerns are usually mitigated by combining cryptographic mechanisms with suitable key management architecture. However, cryptographic operations may be quite resource-intensive, placing a considerable burden on the vehicle’s V2X computing unit. To assuage this issue, it is reasonable to use hardware acceleration for common cryptographic primitives, such as block ciphers, digital signature schemes, and key exchange protocols. In this scenario, custom extension instructions can be a plausible option, since they achieve fine-tune hardware acceleration with a low to moderate logic overhead, while also reducing code size. In this article, we apply this method along with dual-data memory banks for the hardware acceleration of the PRESENT block cipher, as well as for the $F_{2^{255}-19}$ finite field arithmetic employed in cryptographic primitives based on Curve25519 (e.g., EdDSA and X25519). As a result, when compared with a state-of-the-art software-optimized implementation, the performance of PRESENT is improved by a factor of 17 to 34 and code size is reduced by 70%, with only a 4.37% increase in FPGA logic overhead. In addition, we improve the performance of operations over Curve25519 by a factor of ~2.5 when compared to an Assembly implementation on a comparable processor, with moderate logic overhead (namely, 9.1%). Finally, we achieve significant performance gains in the V2X provisioning process by leveraging our hardware-accelerated cryptographic primitive