Crypto Module Research Articles

A lightweight authentication protocol for IoT‐based cloud environment

SummaryWith the ever‐growing use of active internet devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) has achieved vast popularity at present. Authentication technology is essential for the success of integrating IoT and cloud computing. Recently, the adversary capabilities are enhanced, and the current authentication techniques are vulnerable in plenty of possible network attacks. This paper presents a secure and lightweight authentication protocol for IoT‐based cloud environment. The proposed scheme can withstand various attacks and provide secure mutual authentication and anonymity by utilizing secret parameters and biometric. Lightweight crypto modules are adopted to pursue the best energy efficiency. The AVISPA tool is used to evaluate the protocol's performance. The obtained results indicate that the proposed protocol can effectively resist all kinds of known vulnerabilities.

IPsec for high speed network links: Performance analysis and enhancements

Network packets security has always been significantly important and well researched topic but the network throughput and latency are not optimal on high speed network links, when using existing IPsec solutions. Network packet processing in Linux kernel is significantly slow (especially for 10-G/40-G link speed) due to context switching associated with system calls, and transitional copy operations in packet traversal through all network layers. Control plane layered packet processing involve copy operation per layer, which increases the packet processing time and consequently decreases the throughput of the network. In contrast to the kernel networking, data plane solutions like DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) provide direct access to packets (from NIC) in user-space bypassing kernel stack, with zero intermediate copy operations and no context switching. For the normal packets, Intel DPDK claims 10x improvement in the throughput over kernel networking. Being inspired by that remarkable efficiency, we have done empirical evaluation of IPsec performance in data plane. Towards this goal, primarily we have analyzed the performance effect by individual bottleneck modules of strongSwan (an IPsec implementation); by redesigning them with data plane equivalent modules. Secondarily, we have proposed an efficient solution for strongSwan using DPDK API; which eliminates all previously identified bottleneck modules. In the proposed design, multi-cores design has been incorporated in the crypto module and performance is analyzed in terms of throughput and latency. There is an improvement of up to 3.54x in throughput and 2.54x improvement in latency as compared to existing control plane design. With AES128GCM as encryption scheme, a maximum throughput of 4.795 Gbps is achieved, while using only two cores.

Novel GF($2_m$) Digit-Serial PISO Multipliers for the Self-Dual Gaussian Normal Bases

Security protocols such as Transport Layer Security implement the Elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) over different binary extension fields defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Specifically, such multiple cipher-suite support is a security recommendation. Binary extension field arithmetic processors are expensive, especially if more than one field is supported. In this context, this article introduces a novel lightweight digit-serial parallel-in-serial-out (DS-PISO) design for versatile multiplication (DS-VPISO) targeting the NIST-like fields in resource constrained embedded systems where the crypto module allocation is limited. The proposed DS-VPISO multiplier offers competitive area (up to 40 percent area savings) compared to existing multiple field multiplier schemes based on results conducted on bit-serial implementations using Intel's Field programmable gate arrays. The article first presents a DS-PISO self-dual Gaussian normal basis multiplication architecture based on the trace mapping. After this, the article extends the new trace based DS-PISO multiplier to construct an architecture for the first versatile DS-PISO multiplication (DS-VPISO) targeting NIST's binary fields. The latter extension to versatile multiplication is based on novel architectures for versatile cyclic shifts and versatile multiplication by normal elements.

Fast and automatic security test on cryptographic ICs against fault injection attacks based on design for security test

Fault injection attacks have constituted a serious threat against cryptographic integrated circuits (ICs). However, the security test nowadays is just sample test with workload statistics and experiences as the qualitative criterion, and results in costly, time-consuming and error-prone test procedures. This study presents a design for security test (DFST) method for cryptographic ICs against fault injection attacks. The DFST involves identifying the sensitive registers for various crypto modules, inserting the scan chains and generating the specific test patterns for security test. Then the security test is conducted on the manufactured cryptographic ICs with the industrial automatic test equipment. With this DFST method, a fast and automatic security test can be applied onto volume production of cryptographic ICs. Experimental results on an RSA implementation demonstrate the validity of this method.

PUF Sensor: Exploiting PUF Unreliability for Secure Wireless Sensing

Wireless sensors are increasingly penetrating every domain of our lives through integration with Internet of Things, e.g., such devices are widely incorporated into smart buildings and for monitoring critical industrial infrastructure. Sensing, collecting and communication of sensor data, however, are under threat from various attacks due to the difficulty in implementing proper protection mechanisms and limited computational resources available in these cost-sensitive devices. This paper expands on recent research on physical unclonable function (PUF) sensors to secure sensing by taking the advantage of inherent physical randomness. In particular, PUF unreliability originates from its sensitivity to ambient parameter variations that is usually undesirable for elementary PUF applications—such as authentication and key generation—is exploited to guarantee the veracity of the sensed value. In this paper, a PUF naturally acting as a sensor or a PUF explicitly integrated with a sensor is called a PUF sensor. Security of sensing in a PUF sensor is attributed to the natural merging of cryptography and sensing to eschew the need for a standalone crypto module. Thus, the PUF sensor is appealing for low-cost applications. To obtain the sensed value, we develop an authenticated sensing protocol that is robust against eavesdropping, also capable of detecting man-in-the-middle manipulation of the sensed value. Compared to initial investigations of PUF sensors, we avoid the stringent requirements of a strong PUF. We validate the feasibility of the proposed authenticated sensing protocol based on an experimental implementation of a ring oscillator PUF sensor. To improve the sensing capability, we present an efficient approach to select sensitive responses and only employ them for sensing. Significantly improved efficacy is validated through comprehensive experimental results.

Defense Mechanisms against Machine Learning Modeling Attacks on Strong Physical Unclonable Functions for IOT Authentication: A Review

Security component in IoT system are very crucial because the devices within the IoT system are exposed to numerous malicious attacks. Typical security components in IoT system performs authentication, authorization, message and content integrity check. Regarding authentication, it is normally performed using classical authentication scheme using crypto module. However, the utilization of the crypto module in IoT authentication is not feasible because of the distributed nature of the IoT system which complicates the message cipher and decipher process. Thus, the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is suggested to replace crypto module for IoT authentication because it only utilizes responses from set of challenges instead of cryptographic keys to authenticate devices. PUF can generate large number of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) which is good for authentication because the unpredictability is high. However, with the emergence of machine learning modeling, the CRPs now can be predicted through machine learning algorithms. Various defense mechanisms were proposed to counter machine learning modeling attacks (ML-MA). Although they were experimentally proven to be able to increase resiliency against ML-MA, they caused the generated responses to be instable and incurred high area overhead. Thus, there is a need to design the best defense mechanism which is not only resistant to ML-MA but also produces reliable responses and reduces area overhead. This paper presents an analysis on defense mechanisms against ML-MA on strong PUFs for IoT authentication.

A new authenticated encryption technique for handling long ciphertexts in memory constrained devices

In authenticated encryption schemes, there are two techniques for handling long ciphertexts while working within the constraints of a low buffer size: Releasing unverified plaintext (RUP) or Producing intermediate tags (PIT). In this paper, in addition to the two techniques, we propose another way to handle a long ciphertext with a low buffer size by storing and releasing only one (generally, or only few) intermediate state without releasing or storing any part of an unverified plaintext and without need of generating any intermediate tag. In this paper we explain this generalized technique using our new construction sp-AELM. sp-AELM is a sponge based authenticated encryption scheme that provides support for limited memory devices. We also provide its security proof for privacy and authenticity in an ideal permutation model, using a code based game playing framework. Furthermore, we also present two more variants of sp-AELM that serve the same purpose and are more efficient than sp-AELM. The ongoing CAESAR competition has 9 submissions which are based on the Sponge construction. We apply our generalized technique of storing single intermediate state to all these submissions, to determine their suitability with a Crypto module having limited memory. Our findings show that only ASCON and one of the PRIMATE’s mode(namely GIBBON) satisify the limited memory constraint using this technique, while the remaining schemes (namely, Artemia, ICEPOLE, Ketje, Keyak, NORX, Π-cipher, STRIBOB and two of the PRIMATEs mode: APE & HANUMAN) are not suitable for this scenario directly.

A new authenticated encryption technique for handling long ciphertexts in memory constrained devices

In authenticated encryption schemes, there are two techniques for handling long ciphertexts while working within the constraints of a low buffer size: releasing unverified plaintext (RUP) or producing intermediate tags (PIT). In this paper, in addition to the two techniques, we propose another way to handle a long ciphertext with a low buffer size by storing and releasing only one (generally, or only few) intermediate state without releasing or storing any part of an unverified plaintext and without need of generating any intermediate tag. In this paper we explain this generalised technique using our new construction sp-AELM. sp-AELM is a sponge-based authenticated encryption scheme that provides support for limited memory devices. We also provide its security proof for privacy and authenticity in an ideal permutation model, using a code-based game playing framework. Furthermore, we also present two more variants of sp-AELM that serve the same purpose and are more efficient than sp-AELM. The ongoing CAESAR competition has nine submissions which are based on the sponge construction. We apply our generalised technique of storing single intermediate state to all these submissions, to determine their suitability with a crypto module having limited memory. Our findings show that only ASCON and one of the PRIMATE's modes (namely GIBBON) satisfy the limited memory constraint using this technique, while the remaining schemes (namely, Artemia, ICEPOLE, Ketje, Keyak, NORX, Π-cipher, STRIBOB and two of the PRIMATEs modes: APE and HANUMAN) are not suitable for this scenario directly.