Clock Frequency Impact on the Performance of High-Security Cryptographic Cipher Suites for Energy-Efficient Resource-Constrained IoT Devices
Open accessAbstract
Modern Internet of Things (IoT) systems have to be able to provide high-security levels, but it is difficult to accommodate computationally-intensive cryptographic algorithms on the resource-constrained hardware used to deploy IoT end nodes. Although this scenario brings the opportunity for using advanced security mechanisms such as Transport Layer Security (TLS), several configuration factors impact both the performance and the energy consumption of IoT systems. In this study, two of the most used TLS authentication algorithms (ECDSA and RSA) were compared when executed on a resource-constrained IoT node based on the ESP32 System-on-Chip (SoC), which was tested at different clock frequencies (80, 160 and 240 MHz) when providing different security levels (from 80 to 192 bits). With every tested configuration, energy consumption and average time per transaction were measured. The results show that ECDSA outperforms RSA in all performed tests and that certain software implementations may lead to scenarios where higher security-level alternatives outperform cryptosystems that are theoretically simpler and lighter in terms of energy consumption and data throughput. Moreover, the performed experiments allow for concluding that higher clock frequencies provide better performance in terms of throughput and, in contrast to what may be expected, less energy consumption.
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Some Industry 4.0 applications store every performed transaction to be able to carry out audits, keep accurate traceability records or make use of Big Data techniques or predictive analytics.
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- Authors
- Suárez-Albela, M., Fraga-Lamas, P., Castedo, L., & Fernández-Caramés, T. M.
- Affiliations
- Universidade da Coruña (ES)
- Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science, Universidade da Coruña, 15071 A Coruña, Spain
- Venue
- Sensors
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2018-12-20
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 15
- ISSN
- 1424-8220 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6338922
- OpenAlex
- W2904270603
- Cited by
- 35
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 5 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 2.96
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- dx.doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Sensors (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- RUC (Universidade Da Coruña) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Xunta de Galicia (ED431C 2016-045, ED341D R2016/012, ED431G/01)
- Agencia Estatal de Investigación of Spain and ERDF funds of the EU (AEI/FEDER, UE) (TEC2013-47141-C4-1-R, TEC2015-69648-REDC, TEC2016-75067-C4-1-R)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Cryptographic Implementations and Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Advanced Authentication Protocols Security
- Keywords
- clock frequency, Internet of Things, resource-constrained devices, Transport Layer Security, ECDSA, energy consumption, cryptographic performance, key size, throughput, Internet of Things security
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