Cryptographic Authentication on the Communication from an 8051 Based Development Board over UDP

Implementing cryptography on devices with low computational power is a necessity as they became involved in communications over public networks. Even more, these devices became ubiquitous and are used in a large area of applications, from home-office systems to industrial control systems. We deal with the design and implementation of a cryptographic protocol that can be used to assure the authenticity of the information broadcasted over UDP from an 8051 based system-on-a-chip to a large number of receivers. The protocol that we use is similar to the well known TESLA protocol that was used in sensor networks, and by using such a protocol information can be broadcasted to a large number of receivers without requiring secret shared keys or expensive public key operations. Some implementation details and experimental results are presented as well, and they show that implementing a cryptographic authentication protocol is feasible even in a constrained environment as offered by the 8051 microcontroller.