FPGA Based Reconfigurable IPSec AH Core Suitable for IoT Applications

Abstract

Real-world deployments of Internet of Things (IoTs) applications require secure communication. The IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) is an important and widely used security protocol (in the IP layer) to provide end to end secure communication. Implementation of the IPSec is a computing intensive work, which significantly limits the performance of the high speed networks. To overcome this issue, hardware implementation of IPSec is a best solution. IPSec includes two main protocols namely, Authentication Header (AH) and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) with two modes of operations, transport mode and tunnel mode. In this work we presented an FPGA implementation of IPSec AH protocol. This implementation supports both, tunnel and transport mode of operation. Cryptographic hash function called Secure Hash Algorithm -- 3 (SHA-3) is used to calculate hash value for AH protocol. The proposed IPSec AH core can be used to provide data authentication security service to IoT applications.