Tree parity machine rekeying architectures

The necessity of securing the communication between hardware components in embedded systems becomes increasingly important with regard to the secrecy of data and particularly its commercial use. We suggest a low-cost (i.e., small logic-area) solution for flexible security levels and short key lifetimes. The basis is an approach for symmetric key exchange using the synchronization of tree parity machines. Fast successive key generation enables a key exchange within a few milliseconds, given realistic communication channels with a limited bandwidth. For demonstration, we evaluate characteristics of a standard-cell ASIC design realization as IP-core in 0.18μ-technology.