Lightweight CRC-based Message Authentication.
Elena Dubrova, Mats Näslund, Göran Selander, Fredrik Lindqvist · 2015
Abstract. Low-cost resource-constrained devices can allocate very lim-ited resources for implementing security. At the same time, they still re-quire some level of protection. In this paper, we present a lightweight mes-sage authentication scheme based on Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC). The presented CRC inherits the implementation simplicity of the conven-tional CRC checksum except that the LFSR implementing its encoding and decoding is made re-programmable. Similarly to previously proposed cryptographic CRCs, it detects both random and malicious errors with-out increasing bandwidth. The main difference from previous approaches is that we use arbitrary instead of irreducible generator polynomials. This eliminates the need for irreducibility tests. We provide a detailed quan-titative analysis of the achieved security as a function of message and CRC sizes. The results show that the presented scheme is particularly suitable for the authentication of short messages.