BP-MAC: Fast Authentication for Short Messages

ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), pp. 201–206

Abstract

Resource-constrained devices increasingly rely on wireless communication for the reliable and low-latency transmission of short messages. However, especially the implementation of adequate integrity protection of time-critical messages places a significant burden on these devices. We address this issue by proposing BP-MAC, a fast and memory-efficient approach for computing message authentication codes based on the well-established Carter-Wegman construction. Our key idea is to offload resource-intensive computations to idle phases and thus save valuable time in latency-critical phases, i.e., when new data awaits processing. Therefore, BP-MAC leverages a universal hash function designed for the bitwise preprocessing of integrity protection to later only require a few XOR operations during the latency-critical phase. Our evaluation on embedded hardware shows that BP-MAC outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of latency and memory overhead, notably for small messages, as required to adequately protect resource-constrained devices with stringent security and latency requirements.

Authors 4

1. Eric Wagner Aachen Fraunhofer FKIE &

   Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Fraunhofer FKIE & RWTH Aachen University, Wachtberg, Germany

2. Martin Serror

   Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics

   Affiliation as printed

   Fraunhofer FKIE, Wachtberg, Germany

3. Klaus Wehrle Aachen

   Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University & Fraunhofer FKIE, Aachen, Germany

4. Martin Henze Aachen

   Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University & Fraunhofer FKIE, Aachen, Germany