Paper 2024/1121

Implementation and Performance Evaluation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography over SECP256R1 on STM32 Microprocessor

Abstract

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in embedded systems has become increasingly popular with advancing technologies. These devices become vulnerable to cyber attacks as they gain popularity. The cryptographic operations performed for the purpose of protection against cyber attacks are crucial to yield fast results in open networks and not slow down network traffic. Therefore, to enhance communication security, studies have been conducted in the literature on using asymmetric encryption and symmetric encryption together in IoT devices for activities such as key sharing, encryption, decryption, data signing, and verifying signed data. In this study, we first propose a cryptographic system engaging of IoT devices operated from a server. Then we do performance analysis of our proposal. In particular, we evaluate the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange and elliptic curve digital signature algorithms on the Secp256r1 elliptic curve and AES symmetric encryption via the Micro uECC library conducted with the 32-bit STM32F410RB Nucleo development board microprocessor running at 48 MHz.