2021/06/09 by Gustavo Banegas, Banegas, Gustavo, Koen Zandberg +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Security and Verification in Computing #Cryptographic Implementations and Security #Radiation Effects in Electronics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.05577
As the Internet of Things (IoT) rolls out today to devices whose lifetime may\nwell exceed a decade, conservative threat models should consider attackers with\naccess to quantum computing power. The SUIT standard (specified by the IETF)\ndefines a security architecture for IoT software updates, standardizing the\nmetadata and the cryptographic tools-namely, digital signatures and hash\nfunctions-that guarantee the legitimacy of software updates. While the\nperformance of SUIT has previously been evaluated in the pre-quantum context,\nit has not yet been studied in a post-quantum context. Taking the open-source\nimplementation of SUIT available in RIOT as a case study, we overview\npost-quantum considerations, and quantum-resistant digital signatures in\nparticular, focusing on lowpower, microcontroller-based IoT devices which have\nstringent resource constraints in terms of memory, CPU, and energy consumption.\nWe benchmark a selection of proposed post-quantum signature schemes (LMS,\nFalcon, and Dilithium) and compare them with current pre-quantum signature\nschemes (Ed25519 and ECDSA). Our benchmarks are carried out on a variety of IoT\nhardware including ARM Cortex-M, RISC-V, and Espressif (ESP32), which form the\nbulk of modern 32-bit microcontroller architectures. We interpret our benchmark\nresults in the context of SUIT, and estimate the real-world impact of\npost-quantum alternatives for a range of typical software update categories.\nCCS CONCEPTS bullet Computer systems organization \→ Embedded\nsystems.\n