High Speed Implementation of Authenticated Encryption for the MSP430X Microcontroller

Authenticated encryption is a symmetric cryptography scheme that provides both confidentiality and authentication. In this work we describe an optimized implementation of authenticated encryption for the MSP430X family of microcontrollers. The CCM, GCM, SGCM, OCB3, Hummingbird-2 and MASHA authenticated encryption schemes were implemented at the 128-bit level of security and their performance was compared. The AES accelerator included in some models of the MSP430X family is also studied and we explore its characteristics to improve the performance of the implemented modes, achieving up to 10 times of speedup. The CCM and OCB3 schemes were the fastest when using the AES accelerator while MASHA and Hummingbird-2 were the fastest when using only software.