Paper 2015/1138

Lightweight CRC-based Authentication

Elena Dubrova, Mats Näslund, Göran Selander, and Fredrik Lindqvist

Abstract

Low-cost resource-constrained devices can allocate very limited resources for implementing security. At the same time, they still require some level of protection. In this paper, we present a lightweight message authentication scheme based on Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC). The presented CRC inherits the implementation simplicity of the conventional CRC checksum except that the LFSR implementing its encoding and decoding is made re-programmable. Similarly to previously proposed cryptographic CRCs, it detects both random and malicious errors without increasing bandwidth. The main difference from previous approaches is that we use arbitrary instead of irreducible generator polynomials. This eliminates the need for irreducibility tests. We provide a detailed quantitative analysis of the achieved security as a function of message and CRC sizes. The results show that the presented scheme is particularly suitable for the authentication of short messages.

Note: Acknowledgement is added

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
Message authenticationdata integrity protectionhash functionCRCerror-detection
Contact author(s)
dubrova @ kth se
History
2015-12-08: revised
2015-11-26: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/1138
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/1138,
      author = {Elena Dubrova and Mats Näslund and Göran Selander and Fredrik Lindqvist},
      title = {Lightweight CRC-based Authentication},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2015/1138},
      year = {2015},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1138}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1138}
}
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