BP-MAC: Fast Authentication for Short Messages

TL;DR

BP-MAC is a novel, efficient message authentication approach tailored for resource-limited devices, significantly reducing latency and memory use during short message authentication by leveraging precomputation and simple XOR operations.

Contribution

The paper introduces BP-MAC, a fast, memory-efficient authentication method based on Carter-Wegman construction that offloads computation to idle phases for resource-constrained devices.

Findings

BP-MAC reduces authentication latency compared to existing methods.

It requires less memory, making it suitable for embedded devices.

Performance improvements are most notable for small messages.

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.