Towards Efficient Application of Cryptographic Schemes on Constrained Microcontrollers

Abstract

This work deals with the application of cryptographic schemes and primitives on the computational and memory-restricted microcontrollers. The efficient implementation of proper cryptographic schemes on these devices improves the security and performance of many applications and communication services in wireless sensor networks, Internet of Things, embedded systems and home automation and other systems which employ constrained devices. In this work, we experimentally implement well-known and widely used cryptographic schemes on the MSP430FX family of microcontrollers and study their performance and memory demands. On these microcontrollers, we evaluate 10 symmetric ciphers, 8 hash functions, modular arithmetic operations and asymmetric cryptographic schemes. Based on obtained results we propose a lightweight cryptographic solution which provides authentication and secure data communication. Our solution has two versions which are designed for applications that must use memory-constrained microcontrollers and for real-time applications that require efficiency and security. We believe that our proposal and results can help engineers and developers to improve the security or performance in their applications that employ constrained devices.