Efficient Implementation of ECDH Key Exchange for MSP430-Based Wireless Sensor Networks
English
Liu, Zhe[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC) >]
Seo, Hwajeong[Pusan National University > School of Computer Science and Engineering]
Hu, Zhi[Central South University > School of Mathematics and Statistics]
Huang, Xinyi[Fujian Normal University > School of Mathematics and Computer Scienc]
Groszschädl, Johann[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC) >]
Apr-2015
ASIACCS'15: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security, April 14-17, 2015, Singapore
Bao, Feng
Miller, Steven
Zhou, Jianying
Ahn, Gail-Joon
ACM Press
145-153
Yes
International
978-1-4503-3245-3
10th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS 2015)
[en] Public-Key Cryptography (PKC) is an indispensable building block of modern security protocols, and, thus, essential for secure communication over insecure networks. Despite a significant body of research devoted to making PKC more "lightweight," it is still commonly perceived that software implementations of PKC are computationally too expensive for practical use in ultra-low power devices such as wireless sensor nodes. In the present paper we aim to challenge this perception and present a highly-optimized implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for the TI MSP430 series of 16-bit microcontrollers. Our software is inspired by MoTE-ECC and supports scalar multiplication on two families of elliptic curves, namely Montgomery and twisted Edwards curves. However, in contrast to MoTE-ECC, we use pseudo-Mersenne prime fields as underlying algebraic structure to facilitate inter-operability with existing ECC implementations. We introduce a novel "zig-zag" technique for multiple-precision squaring on the MSP430 and assess its execution time. Similar to MoTE-ECC, we employ the Montgomery model for variable-base scalar multiplications and the twisted Edwards model if the base point is fixed (e.g. to generate an ephemeral key pair). Our experiments show that the two scalar multiplications needed to perform an ephemeral ECDH key exchange can be accomplished in 4.88 million clock cycles altogether (using a 159-bit prime field), which sets a new speed record for ephemeral ECDH on a 16-bit processor. We also describe the curve generation process and analyze the execution time of various field and point arithmetic operations on curves over a 159-bit and a 191-bit pseudo-Mersenne prime field.
[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC) >]
