Lightweight Implementations of NIST P-256 and SM2 ECC on 8-bit Resource-Constraint Embedded Device

Abstract

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) now is one of the most important approach to instantiate asymmetric encryption and signature schemes, which has been extensively exploited to protect the security of cyber-physical systems. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), a great deal of constrained devices may require software implementations of ECC operations. Under this circumstances, the SM2, a set of public key cryptographic algorithms based on elliptic curves published by Chinese Commercial Cryptography Administration Office, was standardized at ISO in 2017 to enhance the cyber-security. However, few research works on the implementation of SM2 for constrained devices have been conducted. In this work, we fill this gap and propose our efficient, secure, and compact implementation of scalar multiplication on a 256-bit elliptic curve recommended by the SM2, as well as a comparison implementation of scalar multiplication on the same bit-length elliptic curve recommended by NIST. We re-design some existent techniques to fit the low-end IoT platform, namely 8-bit AVR processors, and our implementations evaluated on the desired platform show that the SM2 algorithms have competitive efficiency and security with NIST, which would work well to secure the IoT world.