Lightweight Block Cipher Circuits for Automotive and IoT Sensor Devices

Modern cars are equipped with hundreds of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) connected in a Controller Area Network (CAN). These ECUs are used to perform driving functionalities like the movements of accelerator, brakes, steering wheel, etc. Car hacking became a real threat in the last couple of years when a remote attacker was able to take control of a car running on a busy highway. Cryptographic functionalities like authentication, integrity and confidentiality can resist these attacks and so can save people's life. The traditional crypto primitive AES is not an optimal choice in this usage due to its complex operation that leads to long execution latency and big die-area if implemented in HW. To meet real time requirements in this new computing paradigm, a suitable lightweight block cipher is of utmost importance. In this work, we investigate the most suitable lightweight block cipher for automotive platforms. We developed optimized circuits for suitable lightweight block-ciphers. The synthesis and simulation results on Intel's 14nm high-K/metal-gate FinFET CMOS technology show that the proposed design can achieve authentication and confidentiality of an 8-byte message in 12 clock cycles latency with 1.2k gates and 7.04pJ energy. AES would need 10-times more silicon-area and 8-times more energy to achieve similar latency. In this respect, this work offers conclusive directions on lightweight block-ciphers suitable for automotive security.