Luca Crocetti

• Doctor of Engineering
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Pisa

The continuous technical advancement of scientific space missions has resulted in a surge in the amount of data that is transferred to ground stations within short satellite visibility windows, which has consequently led to higher throughput requirements for the hardware involved. To aid synchronization algorithms, the communication standards commo...

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is widely accepted as the de-facto standard for symmetric-key encryption, and it is going to be used in the coming decades because of its resistance against Post-Quantum Cryptography. For this reason, it is the subject of many research works, and almost all converge on the usage of composite/tower fields for t...

Latest technological improvements and investments from government agencies and private companies pushed to the limits the requirements related to both data rate speed and security of the communication links in space applications. The high volume of data and the continuous integration of services opened the path to hackers for new and increasingly d...

This paper presents a cycle-accurate verification environment for the Crypto-Tile, a cryptographic accelerator integrated into the EPI General Purpose Processor. The focus of this work is to provide a robust methodology for validating the functionality and performance of the Crypto-Tile. The verification environment includes an in-depth examination...

In the last decades, the space sector has been the subject of significant technological improvements and investments from both government agencies and private companies, generating an increase in data rates and volumes of exchanged data. Accordingly, the security threats and the number of documented cyberattacks have grown. In order to meet the req...

Recently, there has been a growing interest in Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). These electronic circuits possess several key characteristics such as unpredictability and uniqueness that make them particularly attractive for security applications. PUFs offer an appealing solution for secure boot applications, providing a hardware-based mecha...

Cyberattacks and cybercriminal activities constitute one of the biggest threats in the modern digital era, and the frequency, efficiency, and severity of attacks have grown over the years. Designers and producers of digital systems try to counteract such issues by exploiting increasingly robust and advanced security mechanisms to provide secure exe...

Random number generators are a key element for various applications, such as computer simulation, statistical sampling, and cryptography. They are used to generate/derive cryptographic keys and non-repeating values, e.g., for symmetric or public key cyphers. The strength of a data protection system against cyber attacks corresponds to the strength...

This work describes the hardware implementation of a cryptographic accelerators suite, named Crypto-Tile, in the framework of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) project. The EPI project traced the roadmap to develop the first family of low-power processors with the design fully made in Europe, for Big Data, supercomputers and automotive. Each...

In the cybersecurity field, the generation of random numbers is extremely important because they are employed in different applications such as the generation/derivation of cryptographic keys, nonces, and initialization vectors. The more unpredictable the random sequence, the higher its quality and the lower the probability of recovering the value...

This paper presents a System-on-Chip (SoC) implementation of a cryptographic hardware accelerator supporting multiple AES based block cypher modes, including the more advanced CMAC, CCM, GCM and XTS modes. Furthermore, the proposed design implements in hardware advanced features for AES key secure storage. A flexible interface allows the communicat...

This article presents a cryptographic hardware (HW) accelerator supporting multiple advanced encryption standard (AES)-based block cipher modes, including the more advanced cipher-based MAC (CMAC), counter with CBC-MAC (CCM), Galois counter mode (GCM), and XOR-encrypt-XOR-based tweaked-codebook mode with ciphertext stealing (XTS) modes. The propose...

Cybersecurity is a critical issue for Real-Time IoT applications since high performance and low latencies are required, along with security requirements to protect the large number of attack surfaces to which IoT devices are exposed. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is largely adopted in an IoT context to provide security services such as key-exch...

Random numbers are widely employed in cryptography and security applications. If the generation process is weak, the whole chain of security can be compromised: these weaknesses could be exploited by an attacker to retrieve the information, breaking even the most robust implementation of a cipher. Due to their intrinsic close relationship with anal...

This paper proposes the architecture of the hash accelerator, developed in the framework of the European Processor Initiative. The proposed circuit supports all the SHA2 and SHA-3 operative modes and is to be one of the hardware cryptographic accelerators within the crypto-tile of the European Processor Initiative. The accelerator has been verified...

In the context of growing the adoption of advanced sensors and systems for active vehicle safety and driver assistance, an increasingly important issue is the security of the information exchanged between the different sub-systems of the vehicle. Random number generation is crucial in modern encryption and security applications as it is a critical...

Random numbers are widely employed in cryptography and security applications, and they represent one of the main aspects to take care of along a security chain. They are employed for creation of encryption keys, and if generation process is weak, the whole chain can be compromised: weaknesses could be exploited to retrieve the key, thus breaking ev...

Modern networks have critical security needs and a suitable level of protection and performance is usually achieved with the use of dedicated hardware cryptographic cores. Although the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is considered the best approach when symmetric cryptography is required, one of its main weaknesses lies in its measurable power c...

The work analyses the cybersecurity weakness in state-of-art automotive in-vehicle networks and discusses possible countermeasures at architecture level. Due to stringent real-time constraints (throughput and latency) of fail-safe automotive applications, hardware accelerators are needed. A hardware accelerator design for AES (Advanced Encryption S...

Addressing Man-In-The-Middle threat in automotive wireless links Luca Crocetti, Luca Baldanzi and Luca Fanucci Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa Connected cars is one of the hot topic in the automotive field because it is a fundamental step along the roadmap to autonomous driving. Wireless communication links such as Wi-Fi...

Modern networks have critical security needs and a suitable level of protection and performance is usually achieved with the use of dedicated hardware cryptographic cores. Although the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is considered the best approach when symmetric cryptography is required, one of its main weaknesses lies in its measurable power c...

The continuous increase in complexity in automotive electronics has led to cars that include up to 80 Electronic Control Units (ECUs). As a consequence, in-car networks are currently up to their limit in terms of data load, flexibility and bandwidth. The Ethernet backbone is thus considered as the best performing solution. On the other hand, the gr...