Abstract
Maximizing the battery lifetime of wireless sensor nodes and equipping them with elliptic curve cryptography is a challenge that requires new energy-saving architectures. In this paper, we present an architecture that drops a hardware accelerator between CPU and RAM. Thus neither the CPU nor the data memory need to be modified. In a detailed comparison with a software-only and a dedicated hardware architecture, we show that the drop-in concept is smaller than the dedicated hardware module, while achieving similarly fast runtimes. Most interesting for micro-chip manufacturers is that only 4 kGE of chip area need to be committed for the dedicated drop-in accelerator.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
American National Standards Institute (ANSI). AMERICAN NATIONAL STANDARD X9.62-2005. Public Key Cryptography for the Financial Services Industry, The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, ECDSA (2005)
Certicom Research. Standards for Efficient Cryptography, SEC 2: Recommended Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters, Version 1.0 (September 2000)
Cohen, H., Frey, G., Avanzi, R., Doche, C., Lange, T., Nguyen, K., Vercauteren, F. (eds.): Handbook of Elliptic and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography. Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton (2006)
Comba, P.: Exponentiation cryptosystems on the IBM PC. IBM Systems Journal, 526–538 (1990)
Coron, J.-S.: Resistance against Differential Power Analysis for Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems. In: Koç, Ç.K., Paar, C. (eds.) CHES 1999. LNCS, vol. 1717, pp. 292–302. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Eberle, H., Wander, A., Gura, N., Chang-Shantz, S., Gupta, V.: Architectural Extensions for Elliptic Curve Cryptography over GF(2m) on 8-bit Microprocessors. In: IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors, pp. 343–349. IEEE Computer Society (2005)
Fan, J., Verbauwhede, I.: An Updated Survey on Secure ECC Implementations: Attacks, Countermeasures and Cost. In: Naccache, D. (ed.) Quisquater Festschrift. LNCS, vol. 6805, pp. 265–282. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Gouvêa, C.P.L., López, J.: Software Implementation of Pairing-Based Cryptography on Sensor Networks Using the MSP430 Microcontroller. In: Roy, B., Sendrier, N. (eds.) INDOCRYPT 2009. LNCS, vol. 5922, pp. 248–262. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Gouvêa, C.P.L., Oliveira, L., López, J.: Efficient Software Implementation of Public-Key Cryptography on Sensor Networks Using the MSP430X Microcontroller. Journal of Cryptographic Engineering 2, 19–29 (2012)
Großschädl, J., Savaş, E.: Instruction Set Extensions for Fast Arithmetic in Finite Fields GF(p) and GF(2m). In: CHES, pp. 133–147 (2004)
Guo, X., Schaumont, P.: Optimizing the HW/SW boundary of an ECC SoC design using control hierarchy and distributed storage. In: DATE, pp. 454–459 (2009)
Gura, N., Patel, A., Wander, A., Eberle, H., Shantz, S.C.: Comparing Elliptic Curve Cryptography and RSA on 8-Bit CPUs. In: CHES, pp. 119–132 (2004)
Hankerson, D., Menezes, A.J., Vanstone, S.: Guide to Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Springer (2004)
Hein, D., Wolkerstorfer, J., Felber, N.: ECC Is Ready for RFID – A Proof in Silicon. In: Avanzi, R.M., Keliher, L., Sica, F. (eds.) SAC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5381, pp. 401–413. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Hutter, M., Joye, M., Sierra, Y.: Memory-Constrained Implementations of Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Co-Z Coordinate Representation. In: Nitaj, A., Pointcheval, D. (eds.) AFRICACRYPT 2011. LNCS, vol. 6737, pp. 170–187. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
IEEE. IEEE Standard 802.15.4-2003: Wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs) (May 2003)
Itoh, T., Tsujii, S.: Effective recursive algorithm for computing multiplicative inverses in GF(2m). Electronic Letters, 334–335 (1988)
Koschuch, M., Großschädl, J., Page, D., Grabher, P., Hudler, M., Krüger, M.: Hardware/Software Co-Design of Public-Key Cryptography for SSL Protocol Execution in Embedded Systems. In: Workshop on Embedded Systems Security, pp. 63–79 (2009)
Kumar, S.S., Paar, C.: Are standards compliant Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems feasible on RFID? In: Workshop on RFID Security – RFIDSec 2006 (2006)
Lee, Y.K., Sakiyama, K., Batina, L., Verbauwhede, I.: Elliptic-Curve-Based Security Processor for RFID. IEEE Transactions on Computers 57(11), 1514–1527 (2008)
Liu, A., Ning, P.: TinyECC: A Configurable Library for Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks. In: International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, pp. 245–256 (2008)
López, J., Dahab, R.: Fast Multiplication on Elliptic Curves over GF(2m) without Precomputation. In: Koç, Ç.K., Paar, C. (eds.) CHES 1999. LNCS, vol. 1717, pp. 316–327. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). FIPS-186-3: Digital Signature Standard, DSS (2009)
Olivier Girard. openMSP430 (2013), http://opencores.org/project,openmsp430
Öztürk, E., Sunar, B., Savaş, E.: Low-Power Elliptic Curve Cryptography Using Scaled Modular Arithmetic. In: Joye, M., Quisquater, J.-J. (eds.) CHES 2004. LNCS, vol. 3156, pp. 92–106. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Szczechowiak, P., Oliveira, L.B., Scott, M., Collier, M., Dahab, R.: NanoECC: Testing the Limits of Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Sensor Networks. In: Verdone, R. (ed.) EWSN 2008. LNCS, vol. 4913, pp. 305–320. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Texas Instruments. MSP430C11x1 - Mixed Signal Microcontroller (2008), http://focus.ti.com
Wang, H., Sheng, B., Li, Q.: Elliptic Curve Cryptography-based Access Control in Sensor Networks. International Journal of Security and Networks, 127–137 (2006)
Wenger, E., Hutter, M.: Exploring the design space of prime field vs. binary field ECC-hardware implementations. In: Laud, P. (ed.) NordSec 2011. LNCS, vol. 7161, pp. 256–271. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Wolkerstorfer, J.: Is Elliptic-Curve Cryptography Suitable for Small Devices? In: Workshop on RFID and Lightweight Crypto, pp. 78–91 (2005)
ZigBee Alliance. The ZigBee Alliance Website, http://www.zigbee.org/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Wenger, E. (2013). Hardware Architectures for MSP430-Based Wireless Sensor Nodes Performing Elliptic Curve Cryptography. In: Jacobson, M., Locasto, M., Mohassel, P., Safavi-Naini, R. (eds) Applied Cryptography and Network Security. ACNS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7954. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38980-1_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38980-1_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38979-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38980-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)