NaCl’s crypto_box in hardware Michael Hutter1;, Jürgen Schilling2, Peter Schwabe3, and Wolfgang Wieser2 ? 1 Rambus Cryptography Research Division 425 Market Street, 11th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA
[email protected] 2 Graz University of Technology, IAIK Inffeldgasse 16a, A-8010, Graz, Austria
[email protected],
[email protected] 3 Radboud University Digital Security Group, PO Box 9010, 6500GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands
[email protected] Abstract. This paper presents a low-resource hardware implementation of the widely used crypto_box function of the Networking and Cryptog- raphy library (NaCl). It supports the X25519 Diffie-Hellman key ex- change using Curve25519, the Salsa20 stream cipher, and the Poly1305 message authenticator. Our targeted application is a secure communica- tion between devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet servers. Such devices are highly resource-constrained and require carefully op- timized hardware implementations. We propose the first solution that enables 128-bit-secure public-key authenticated encryption on passively- powered IoT devices like WISP nodes. From a cryptographic point of view we thus make a first step to turn these devices into fully-fledged participants of Internet communication. Our crypto processor needs a silicon area of 14.6 kGEs and less than 40 µW of power at 1 MHz for a 130 nm low-leakage CMOS process technology. Keywords: Internet of Things, ASIC, Salsa20, Poly1305, Curve25519. 1 Introduction We need to empower computers with their own means of gathering in- formation, so they can see, hear and smell the world for themselves, in all its random glory. RFID and sensor technology enable computers to observe, identify and understand the world—without the limitations of human-entered data.