Name
Title | ||
|---|---|---|
A Practical Performance Comparison of ECC and RSA for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices |
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
One of the main concerns regarding Internet of Things (IoT) networks is the security of the communications between IoT nodes and the upper layers of the architecture. Since the vast majority of IoT nodes are constrained in terms of power consumption and computational capabilities, the security of their communications is usually lightly addressed. Thus, new IoT hardware platforms are facing this lack of security by including hardware-accelerated cryptographic capabilities. This brings the opportunity to use advanced security mechanisms such as Transport Layer Security (TLS). In this paper, two of the most used TLS authentication algorithms (i.e., ECDSA and RSA) are compared using a resource-constrained IoT node based on the ESP32 SoC (System-on-Chip). The tests are driven by the concept of security level, allowing for a fair comparison in terms of the computational power required to break each cryptographic algorithm. Specifically, security levels from 80 to 192 were tested. A 512-byte JSON file was downloaded 100 consecutive times while measuring both energy consumption and the average time per transaction. The results show that, although ECDSA outperforms RSA in all the performed tests, real-world scenario testing is needed to determine which security configuration is the best for a hardware platform. Software optimizations and implementations could lead to scenarios where higher security level alternatives outperform simpler and theoretically lighter ones in terms of energy consumption and data throughput. Specifically, the obtained results show that the curve secp256r1 outperforms the curve secp224r1, while providing a higher security level, due to optimizations made on the libraries implementing the ECC operations. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2018 | 10.1109/GIOTS.2018.8534575 | 2018 Global Internet of Things Summit (GIoTS) |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
IoT security,ECC,ECDSA,RSA,ECDHE,TLS,energy consumption,cryptographic security | Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm,Cryptography,Computer science,Computer network,Data Authentication Algorithm,Scenario testing,Throughput,Energy consumption,Transport Layer Security,JSON | Conference |
ISBN | Citations | PageRank |
978-1-5386-6452-0 | 1 | 0.36 |
References | Authors | |
0 | 4 | |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manuel Suárez-Albela | 1 | 21 | 1.49 |
| Tiago M. Fernández-Caramés | 2 | 226 | 18.31 |
| Paula Fraga-Lamas | 3 | 241 | 19.01 |
| Luis Castedo | 4 | 577 | 73.24 |