Implementing Security Protocols in Wireless Embedded System: A Power Performance Analysis

Abstract

As embedded devices are increasingly integrated into personal and commercial infrastructures, security becomes a paramount issue. The design of security for embedded systems differs from traditional security design because these systems are resource constrained in their capacities and easily accessible to adversaries at the physical layer.

Implementing security in wireless embedded devices arises new challenges due to the unique characteristics of battery powered embedded systems. The work is focused on an important constraint of such devices - battery life and examines how it is impacted by the use of security protocols. Software power consumption minimization is becoming more important and a very relevant issue in the design of embedded systems, in particular those dedicated to mobile devices. This motivates the need for minimizing power consumption from the point of view of software rather than at circuit and gate level, which is cumbersome.

This dissertation aims at reviewing state of the art of different cryptography protocol implementations and optimizations for reducing the power and energy consumption. It also restricts the size of lookup tables and imposes constraints on the code size where run-time memory and program ROM are scarce resources.

The protocols are implemented in C language. Using the gcc compiler with Sim–Power Analyzer as the simulation kernel protocols have been evaluated on the ARM cores. Different coding methods have been identified aiming at reducing the power consumption for the ARM processors.

The performance improvement of cryptography algorithms is demonstrated on different ARM processors such as Intel StrongARM -1110, ARM7 and ARM9TDMI, where Intel’s StrongARM-1110 found to be low energy processors i.e. it consumes low energy as compared to other processors. Also AES found to be the most energy efficient symmetric algorithm and RSA among the asymmetric implemented algorithms. So, AES in combination with RSA on the StrongARM-1110 processor can be the best choice for implementing security protocol.