Cryptographic API for Embedded Applications

Abstract

This paper presents GEmSysC, an unified cryptographic API for embedded systems. Software layers implementing this API can be built over existing libraries, allowing embedded software to access cryptographic functions in a consistent way that does not depend on the underlying library. The API complies to good practices for API design and good practices for embedded software development and took its inspiration from other cryptographic libraries and standards. The main inspiration for creating GEmSysC was the CMSIS-RTOS standard, which defines an unified API for embedded software in a implementation-independent way, but targets operating systems instead of cryptographic functions. GEmSysC is made of a generic core and attachable modules, one for each cryptographic algorithm. Until now, three modules were been fully specified: AES, RSA, and SHA-256. As a proof of concept, two implementations of GEmSysC were made. One of them was built over wolfSSL, which is an open source library for embedded systems. The other was built over OpenSSL, which is open source and a de facto standard. Unlike wolfSSL, OpenSSL does not specifically target embedded systems. This paper displays test results showing GEmSysC to be simpler than other libraries in some aspects. These results have shown that both implementations incur in little overhead in computation time compared to the cryptographic libraries themselves. The overhead of the implementation has been measured for each cryptographic algorithm and is between around 0% and 0.17% for the implementation over wolfSSL and between 0.03% and 1.40% for the one over OpenSSL. This document also presents the memory costs for each implementation.