| .. _tinycrypt: |
| |
| TinyCrypt Cryptographic Library |
| ############################### |
| |
| Overview |
| ******** |
| The TinyCrypt Library provides an implementation for targeting constrained devices |
| with a minimal set of standard cryptography primitives, as listed below. To better |
| serve applications targeting constrained devices, TinyCrypt implementations differ |
| from the standard specifications (see the Important Remarks section for some |
| important differences). Certain cryptographic primitives depend on other |
| primitives, as mentioned in the list below. |
| |
| Aside from the Important Remarks section below, valuable information on the usage, |
| security and technicalities of each cryptographic primitive are found in the |
| corresponding header file. |
| |
| * SHA-256: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Hash function. |
| * Standard Specification: NIST FIPS PUB 180-4. |
| * Requires: -- |
| |
| * HMAC-SHA256: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Message authentication code. |
| * Standard Specification: RFC 2104. |
| * Requires: SHA-256 |
| |
| * HMAC-PRNG: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Pseudo-random number generator. |
| * Standard Specification: NIST SP 800-90A. |
| * Requires: SHA-256 and HMAC-SHA256. |
| |
| * AES-128: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Block cipher. |
| * Standard Specification: NIST FIPS PUB 197. |
| * Requires: -- |
| |
| * AES-CBC mode: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Encryption mode of operation. |
| * Standard Specification: NIST SP 800-38A. |
| * Requires: AES-128. |
| |
| * AES-CTR mode: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Encryption mode of operation. |
| * Standard Specification: NIST SP 800-38A. |
| * Requires: AES-128. |
| |
| * AES-CMAC mode: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Message authentication code. |
| * Standard Specification: NIST SP 800-38B. |
| * Requires: AES-128. |
| |
| * AES-CCM mode: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Authenticated encryption. |
| * Standard Specification: NIST SP 800-38C. |
| * Requires: AES-128. |
| |
| * ECC-DH: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Key exchange. |
| * Standard Specification: RFC 6090. |
| * Requires: ECC auxiliary functions (ecc.h/c). |
| |
| * ECC-DSA: |
| |
| * Type of primitive: Digital signature. |
| * Standard Specification: RFC 6090. |
| * Requires: ECC auxiliary functions (ecc.h/c). |
| |
| Design Goals |
| ************ |
| |
| * Minimize the code size of each cryptographic primitive. This means minimize |
| the size of a board-independent implementation, as presented in TinyCrypt. |
| Note that various applications may require further features, optimizations with |
| respect to other metrics and countermeasures for particular threats. These |
| peculiarities would increase the code size and thus are not considered here. |
| |
| * Minimize the dependencies among the cryptographic primitives. This means |
| that it is unnecessary to build and allocate object code for more primitives |
| than the ones strictly required by the intended application. In other words, |
| one can select and compile only the primitives required by the application. |
| |
| |
| Important Remarks |
| ***************** |
| |
| The cryptographic implementations in TinyCrypt library have some limitations. |
| Some of these limitations are inherent to the cryptographic primitives |
| themselves, while others are specific to TinyCrypt. Some of these limitations |
| are discussed in-depth below. |
| |
| General Remarks |
| *************** |
| |
| * TinyCrypt does **not** intend to be fully side-channel resistant. Due to the |
| variety of side-channel attacks, many of them making certain boards |
| vulnerable. In this sense, instead of penalizing all library users with |
| side-channel countermeasures such as increasing the overall code size, |
| TinyCrypt only implements certain generic timing-attack countermeasures. |
| |
| Specific Remarks |
| **************** |
| |
| * SHA-256: |
| |
| * The number of bits_hashed in the state is not checked for overflow. Note |
| however that this will only be a problem if you intend to hash more than |
| 2^64 bits, which is an extremely large window. |
| |
| * HMAC: |
| |
| * The HMAC verification process is assumed to be performed by the application. |
| This compares the computed tag with some given tag. |
| Note that conventional memory-comparison methods (such as memcmp function) |
| might be vulnerable to timing attacks; thus be sure to use a constant-time |
| memory comparison function (such as compare_constant_time |
| function provided in lib/utils.c). |
| |
| * HMAC-PRNG: |
| |
| * Before using HMAC-PRNG, you *must* find an entropy source to produce a seed. |
| PRNGs only stretch the seed into a seemingly random output of arbitrary |
| length. The security of the output is exactly equal to the |
| unpredictability of the seed. |
| |
| * NIST SP 800-90A requires three items as seed material in the initialization |
| step: entropy seed, personalization and a nonce (which is not implemented). |
| TinyCrypt requires the personalization byte array and automatically creates |
| the entropy seed using a mandatory call to the re-seed function. |
| |
| * AES-128: |
| |
| * The current implementation does not support other key-lengths (such as 256 |
| bits). Note that if you need AES-256, it doesn't sound as though your |
| application is running in a constrained environment. AES-256 requires keys |
| twice the size as for AES-128, and the key schedule is 40% larger. |
| |
| * CTR mode: |
| |
| * The AES-CTR mode limits the size of a data message they encrypt to 2^32 |
| blocks. If you need to encrypt larger data sets, your application would |
| need to replace the key after 2^32 block encryptions. |
| |
| * CBC mode: |
| |
| * TinyCrypt CBC decryption assumes that the iv and the ciphertext are |
| contiguous (as produced by TinyCrypt CBC encryption). This allows for a |
| very efficient decryption algorithm that would not otherwise be possible. |
| |
| * CMAC mode: |
| |
| * AES128-CMAC mode of operation offers 64 bits of security against collision |
| attacks. Note however that an external attacker cannot generate the tags |
| him/herself without knowing the MAC key. In this sense, to attack the |
| collision property of AES128-CMAC, an external attacker would need the |
| cooperation of the legal user to produce an exponentially high number of |
| tags (e.g. 2^64) to finally be able to look for collisions and benefit |
| from them. As an extra precaution, the current implementation allows to at |
| most 2^48 calls to tc_cmac_update function before re-calling tc_cmac_setup |
| (allowing a new key to be set), as suggested in Appendix B of SP 800-38B. |
| |
| * CCM mode: |
| |
| * There are a few tradeoffs for the selection of the parameters of CCM mode. |
| In special, there is a tradeoff between the maximum number of invocations |
| of CCM under a given key and the maximum payload length for those |
| invocations. Both things are related to the parameter 'q' of CCM mode. The |
| maximum number of invocations of CCM under a given key is determined by |
| the nonce size, which is: 15-q bytes. The maximum payload length for those |
| invocations is defined as 2^(8q) bytes. |
| |
| To achieve minimal code size, TinyCrypt CCM implementation fixes q = 2, |
| which is a quite reasonable choice for constrained applications. The |
| implications of this choice are: |
| |
| The nonce size is: 13 bytes. |
| |
| The maximum payload length is: 2^16 bytes = 65 KB. |
| |
| The mac size parameter is an important parameter to estimate the security |
| against collision attacks (that aim at finding different messages that |
| produce the same authentication tag). TinyCrypt CCM implementation |
| accepts any even integer between 4 and 16, as suggested in SP 800-38C. |
| |
| * TinyCrypt CCM implementation accepts associated data of any length between |
| 0 and (2^16 - 2^8) = 65280 bytes. |
| |
| * TinyCrypt CCM implementation accepts: |
| |
| * Both non-empty payload and associated data (it encrypts and |
| authenticates the payload and only authenticates the associated data); |
| |
| * Non-empty payload and empty associated data (it encrypts and |
| authenticates the payload); |
| |
| * Non-empty associated data and empty payload (it degenerates to an |
| authentication-only mode on the associated data). |
| |
| * RFC-3610, which also specifies CCM, presents a few relevant security |
| suggestions, such as: it is recommended for most applications to use a |
| mac size greater than 8. Besides, it is emphasized that the usage of the |
| same nonce for two different messages which are encrypted with the same |
| key obviously destroys the security properties of CCM mode. |
| |
| * ECC-DH and ECC-DSA: |
| |
| * TinyCrypt ECC implementation is based on nano-ecc (see |
| https://github.com/iSECPartners/nano-ecc) which in turn is based on |
| micro-ecc (see https://github.com/kmackay/micro-ecc). In the original |
| nano and micro-ecc documentation, there is an important remark about the |
| way integers are represented: |
| |
| "Integer representation: To reduce code size, all large integers are |
| represented using little-endian words - so the least significant word is |
| first. You can use the 'ecc_bytes2native()' and 'ecc_native2bytes()' |
| functions to convert between the native integer representation and the |
| standardized octet representation." |
| |
| Examples of Applications |
| ************************ |
| It is possible to do useful cryptography with only the given small set of |
| primitives. With this list of primitives it becomes feasible to support a range |
| of cryptography usages: |
| |
| * Measurement of code, data structures, and other digital artifacts (SHA256); |
| |
| * Generate commitments (SHA256); |
| |
| * Construct keys (HMAC-SHA256); |
| |
| * Extract entropy from strings containing some randomness (HMAC-SHA256); |
| |
| * Construct random mappings (HMAC-SHA256); |
| |
| * Construct nonces and challenges (HMAC-PRNG); |
| |
| * Authenticate using a shared secret (HMAC-SHA256); |
| |
| * Create an authenticated, replay-protected session (HMAC-SHA256 + HMAC-PRNG); |
| |
| * Authenticated encryption (AES-128 + AES-CCM); |
| |
| * Key-exchange (EC-DH); |
| |
| * Digital signature (EC-DSA); |
| |
| Test Vectors |
| ************ |
| |
| The library provides a test program for each cryptographic primitive (see 'test' |
| folder). Besides illustrating how to use the primitives, these tests evaluate |
| the correctness of the implementations by checking the results against |
| well-known publicly validated test vectors. |
| |
| For the case of the HMAC-PRNG, due to the necessity of performing an extensive |
| battery test to produce meaningful conclusions, we suggest the user to evaluate |
| the unpredictability of the implementation by using the NIST Statistical Test |
| Suite (see References). |
| |
| For the case of the EC-DH and EC-DSA implementations, most of the test vectors |
| were obtained from the site of the NIST Cryptographic Algorithm Validation |
| Program (CAVP), see References. |
| |
| References |
| ********** |
| |
| * `NIST FIPS PUB 180-4 (SHA-256)`_ |
| |
| .. _NIST FIPS PUB 180-4 (SHA-256): |
| http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips180-4/fips-180-4.pdf |
| |
| * `NIST FIPS PUB 197 (AES-128)`_ |
| |
| .. _NIST FIPS PUB 197 (AES-128): |
| http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips197/fips-197.pdf |
| |
| * `NIST SP800-90A (HMAC-PRNG)`_ |
| |
| .. _NIST SP800-90A (HMAC-PRNG): |
| http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-90A/SP800-90A.pdf |
| |
| * `NIST SP 800-38A (AES-CBC and AES-CTR)`_ |
| |
| .. _NIST SP 800-38A (AES-CBC and AES-CTR): |
| http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-38a/sp800-38a.pdf |
| |
| * `NIST SP 800-38B (AES-CMAC)`_ |
| |
| .. _NIST SP 800-38B (AES-CMAC): |
| http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-38B/SP_800-38B.pdf |
| |
| * `NIST SP 800-38C (AES-CCM)`_ |
| |
| .. _NIST SP 800-38C (AES-CCM): |
| http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-38C/SP800-38C_updated-July20_2007.pdf |
| |
| * `NIST Statistical Test Suite`_ |
| |
| .. _NIST Statistical Test Suite: |
| http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/rng/documentation_software.html |
| |
| * `NIST Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) site`_ |
| |
| .. _NIST Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) site: |
| http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cavp/ |
| |
| * `RFC 2104 (HMAC-SHA256)`_ |
| |
| .. _RFC 2104 (HMAC-SHA256): |
| https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2104.txt |
| |
| * `RFC 6090 (ECC-DH and ECC-DSA)`_ |
| |
| .. _RFC 6090 (ECC-DH and ECC-DSA): |
| https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6090.txt |