An Experimental Study of Cryptography Capability using Chained Key Exchange Scheme for Embedded Devices

TL;DR

This study evaluates the practical implementation of a Chained Key Exchange scheme on embedded devices, specifically Raspberry Pi, to assess the gap between cryptographic protocols and real-world engineering performance.

Contribution

It introduces a modified cryptographic scheme and implementation on embedded hardware, highlighting the feasibility and challenges of deploying secure key exchange protocols in resource-constrained environments.

Findings

Successful implementation of the scheme on Raspberry Pi.

Integration with TFTP for secure key sharing.

Insights into protocol-implementation gaps in embedded systems.

Abstract

After 38 years of birthday Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE), there are many proposed improvements in the DHKE protocol to encounter modern security issues. This protocol seems quite simple to be implemented, but it can be vulnerable to many types of attacks. In this work, we propose the Chained Key Exchange scheme as a case study to explore cryptographic computation capability of embedded microcontroller. We choose ARM RaspberryPi board as hardware platform for experimental setup. To enable RasberberryPi system on chip (SoC) to perform cryptographic computation, we modified the GNU GMP Bignum library to support a simple primitive cryptographic computation in the UBOOT firmware. The main purpose of our study is to determine whether there is any gap between cryptographic protocol-scheme (in term of theoretical) and its engineering implementation. Our scheme will be integrated with Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) application in the UBOOT firmware. Our proposed scheme in the TFTP protocol will secure the sharing of secrets and symmetric keys (e.g., AES256). After that, the symmetric encryption algorithm can be used to encrypt data in the cases of remote system updates, patching and upgrades (e.g., firmware, kernel or application).