WP5-08

Lightweigth Cryptography

ID	WP5-08
Contributor	ROT
Levels	Functional
Require	Communication service
Provide	Communication security and intrusion detection.
Input	A plain text to encrypt or a cyper text to decrypt.
Output	An encrypted message (cyper text) or a decrypted message (plain text).
C4D building block	The component is transversal with respect to the application fields. In the context of C4D, it has been adopted in the UC5 - Demo 1.
TRL	6
Contact	diego.grimani at rotechnology.it

General Description

The Lightweigth Cryptography is supposed to be used by other components which need to encrypt data in order to send it outside the system. The other components have to call the LC component encryption or decryption function according to which operation needs to be carried out. In addition to the encryption/decryption functionalities, an authentication mechanism is carried out during the decryption function to recognize if the encrypted data has been sent by a trusted node. The component is based on TAKS2 scheme, a network topology-based scheme which provides passive security at link layer along a topology-based authentication with minimal performance overhead.

Specification and contribution

In the C4D project, it has been exploited in the UC5 - Demo 1, namely Precision Agricolture, used to secure the communication between drone and rover towards the infrastructure. It has been integrated through components that provide an integrated methodology to implement ready-to-use accelerators from an FPGA-based companion computer that can be used both in the drone and the rover.

Design and Implementation

The scheme works in two different phases: encryption and decryption, the second of which implicitly also carries out Intrusion Detection functionality through the authentication operation. The component is provided as a software library developed in C++ and is architecturally composed by three different modules:

• LCM: takes care of the configuration of the nodes and provides encryption and decryption functionalities;
• TAKS: this module performs the TAKS scheme, executing the message encryption, decryption and authentication functions;
• AES: this library contains the AES-128 standard primitives.

Reference

[1] Pugliese, M, Santucci, F. Pair-wise network topology authenticated hybrid cryptographic keys for Wireless Sensor Networks using vector algebra. In: 5th IEEE international workshop on wireless sensor networks security (WSNS2008), Atlanta, GA, 29 September–2 October 2008. New York: IEEE

[2] Tiberti W, Caruso F, Pomante L, Pugliese M, Santic M, Santucci F. Development of an extended topology-based lightweight cryptographic scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. October 2020.

[3] L. Pomante, M. Pugliese, L. Bozzi, W. Tiberti, D. Grimani and F. Santucci, "SEAMLESS Project: Development of a Performing Secure Platform for IEEE 802.15.4 WSN Applications," 2020 23rd Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD), 2020, pp. 588-595, doi: 10.1109/DSD51259.2020.00097.

[4] https://github.com/RoTechnology/Lightweight-Cryptography