SeCon-NG: Implementing a lightweight cryptographic library based on ECDH and ECDSA for the development of secure and privacy-preserving protocols in contiki-NG

Abstract

There is no doubt that the Internet of Things (IoT) has the power to change our world and drive us to a complete social evolution. In business and industry, there are thousands of IoT use cases and real-life IoT deployments across a variety of sectors (e.g. industry 4.0 and smart factories, smart cities, etc.). However, due to the vastly resource constrained nature of the devices used in IoT, implementing secure and privacy-preserving services, using for example standard asymmetric cryptographic algorithms, has been a real challenge. The majority of IoT devices on the market currently employ the use of various forms of symmetric cryptography such as key pre-distribution. The overall efficiency of such implementations correlate directly to the size of the IoT environment and the deployment method. In this paper, we implement a lightweight cryptographic library that can be used to secure communication protocols between multiple communicating nodes without the need for external trusted entities or a server. Our implementation is based on modifying the Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hillman (ECDH) and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) components of the Tinycrypt cryptographic library. This work focuses on extending the functionalities of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) broadcast application on the Contiki-NG Operating System (OS) platform.