A Performance Study of Crypto-Hardware in the Low-end IoT

Peter Kietzmann; Lena Boeckmann; Leandro Lanzieri; Thomas C.  Schmidt; Matthias Wählisch

Paper 2021/058

A Performance Study of Crypto-Hardware in the Low-end IoT

Peter Kietzmann, Lena Boeckmann, Leandro Lanzieri, Thomas C. Schmidt, and Matthias Wählisch

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.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Published elsewhere. EWSN'21: Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks
Keywords: Internet of Things Embedded Security
Contact author(s): peter kietzmann @ haw-hamburg de
History: 2021-02-13: revised; 2021-01-18: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/058
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/058,
      author = {Peter Kietzmann and Lena Boeckmann and Leandro Lanzieri and Thomas C.  Schmidt and Matthias Wählisch},
      title = {A Performance Study of Crypto-Hardware in the Low-end {IoT}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/058},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/058}
}