This repository contains code and documentation to reproduce experimental results of the paper "A Performance Study of Crypto-Hardware in the Low-end IoT" published in Proc. of the EWSN Conference 2021.
- Peter Kietzmann, Lena Boeckmann, Leandro Lanzieri, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch, A Performance Study of Crypto-Hardware in the Low-end IoT, In: International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), ACM: New York, USA, February 2021.
Abstract
In this paper, we contribute a comprehensive resource analysis for widely used cryptographic primitives across different off-the-shelf IoT platforms, and quantify the performance impact of crypto-hardware. This work builds on the newly designed crypto-subsystem of the IoT operating system RIOT, which provides seamless crypto support across software and hardware components. Our evaluations show that (i) hardware-based crypto outperforms software by considerably over 100 %, which is crucial for nodal lifetime. Despite, the memory consumption typically increases moderately. (ii) Hardware diversity, driver design, and software implementations heavily impact resource efficiency. (iii) External crypto-chips operate slowly on symmetric crypto-operations, but provide secure write-only memory for private credentials, which is unavailable on many platforms.
Please follow our Getting Started instructions for further information how to compile and execute the code.