Robust hardware-supported chaotic cryptosystems for streaming commutations among reduced computing power nodes Pilar Mareca 1 • Borja Bordel 1 Received: 28 April 2018 / Accepted: 23 June 2018 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Most recent technological proposals, such as cyber–physical systems or wireless sensor networks, consist of a collection of tiny nodes designed to be seamless integrated into daily living objects. These nodes then, due to their miniaturized configuration, use to present very limited processing capabilities. Because of that, in general complex algorithms, as which are employed today to secure communications, cannot be implemented in these new systems. Thus, new instruments for security are needed, with a special mention to hardware-supported solutions. Therefore, in this paper different robust hardware-supported cryptosystems based on Chua’s circuit are proposed, studied ad compared. The described solutions are specifically designed to be employed in streaming communications among reduced computing power nodes. Moreover, an experimental validation is proposed comparing the performance of the proposed technologies and other existing solutions. Keywords Cryptography  Chaos  Hardware-supported technologies  Chaotic cryptosystems  Chaotic masking  Chua’s circuit Mathematics Subject Classification 34H10  34D06  37C75 1 Introduction In the last decade, many different new technological paradigms have been proposed. From cyber–physical sys- tems (defined as integrations of computation and physical processes [1]) to wireless sensor networks (consisting of a set of spatially distributed autonomous tiny sensor nodes to monitor and recording physical or environmental condi- tions, which act as both data generators and network relays [2]). There is, however, a common characteristic among all these proposals: they consider miniaturized and reduced computational power devices as main elements into the system. In fact, although many times nodes making up a unique system are a heterogeneous collection of devices with very different functionalities and capabilities, various aspects are common to every element [3]: self-configurable, delay- tolerant, decentralized, etc. Among all of these character- istics, one of the most important aspects is the reduced size and the limited processing (and communication) capabili- ties [4] of the nodes. In this context, traditional algorithms or network solutions are not directly applicable to these new systems, as telecommunication networks (such as Internet or Frame Relay) incorporate additional infras- tructures (such as the power supply) and devices with high capacities which cannot be considered in the future engi- neered systems. In that way, some of the most important technological solutions for communication networks (such as routing protocols or handovers) should be redesigned and adapted to these new systems. One of the most affected fields by these limitations is security. Security is a key problem in most recent proposals [5] (see Fig. 1, where the proposed reference architecture for cyber–physical systems by the NIST is showed), and several different solutions addressing this challenge may be found. Firewalls, secure routing protocols or encryption tech- nologies demand too many computational resources to be applied to new engineered systems (usually composed of & Borja Bordel bbordel@dit.upm.es Pilar Mareca mpmareca@fis.upm.es 1 Universidad Polite ´cnica de Madrid, Avenida Complutense no 30, 28040 Madrid, Spain 123 Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-018-1262-x