Efficient Cryptographic Hardware for Safety Message Verification in Internet of Connected Vehicles

Abstract

An important security requirement in automotive networks is to authenticate, sign, and verify thousands of short messages per second by each vehicle. This requirement mandates the use of a high speed Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) hardware. The Residue Number Systems (RNS) provide a natural parallelism and carry-free operations that could speed-up long integer arithmetics of cryptographic algorithms. In this article, we propose a high-speed RNS Montgomery modular reduction units with parallel computing to reduce the latency of the field modular operations. We propose a fully RNS-based ECC scalar multiplication co-processor for NIST-P256r1 and Brainpool256r1 standard curves and improved the scalar multiplication speed using NAF and DBC numbering systems. Compared to the literature, our scheme provides faster computation without compromising the security level. The performance of our fully RNS-ECC point multiplication meets the requirements of the automotive industry.