HAA: Hardware-Accelerated Authentication for internet of things in mission critical vehicular networks

Modern vehicles are being equipped with advanced sensing and communication technologies, which enable them to connect to surrounding entities. In military vehicular networks, it is vital to prevent adversaries from manipulating critical messages via cryptographic protection (e.g., digital signatures) and at the same time to minimize the impact introduced by crypto operations (e.g., delay). Hence, their communication must be delay-aware, scalable and secure. In this paper, we developed Hardware-Accelerated Authentication (HAA) that enables practical realization of delay-aware signatures for vehicular networks. Specifically, we developed a cryptographic hardware-acceleration framework for Rapid Authentication (RA) 1, which is a delay-aware offline-online signature scheme for command and control systems. We showed that HAA can significantly improve the performance of offline-online constructions under high message throughput, which is an important property for vehicular networks. HAA-2048 (GPU) is ×18, ×6, and ×3 times faster than the current CPU implementation of RSA, ECDSA and RA, respectively, for the same level of security.