FPGA based Implementation of ECDSA for Secured ITS

Intelligent Transport System (ITS) provides innovative services to all modes of transportation. It facilitates numerous safety and traffic management applications by providing neighborhood mobility information using wireless communications. To implement this technology, secure wireless communication is a key requirement. As ITS applications involve the safety of vehicles, therefore a lower end-to-end delay is needed. ITS could be subject to security attacks such as man-in-the-middle, denial of service and jamming. A robust cryptographic algorithm is required that can provide defense against data tampering by malicious users. Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) is a well-known cryptographic algorithm that provides robust security with a small message overhead. In this paper, we implement ECDSA signature algorithm on a Virtex 6 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which is capable to validate the real-time constraints of ITS applications. Parallelism is exploited in ECDSA architecture by using parallel processing techniques to reduce the hardware delays, thus reducing the real-time security and end-to-end delay of the ITS messages. The proposed implementation provides faster computational time for signature of ITS messages as compared to other implementations available in the literature.