A Variation of the WTLS Authentication Protocol for Reducing Energy Consumption in Wireless Devices

Abstract

Energy efficiency has been an important factor in protocol design in wireless networks where small handheld wireless devices rely solely on battery power. Security is also of great concern in wireless networks. Several security protocols adapted from wired networks have been used in wireless networks to provide identity authentication. Security protocols could contribute significantly to energy consumption, especially authentication protocols such as Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) Handshake protocol that are based on computationally intensive public key cryptography. There have been many efforts trying to reduce cryptographic load and energy consumption at wireless devices. Some are complicated and others may not comply with existing WTLS/TLS standards. In this paper, we propose a simple variant of TLS Handshake protocol for mutual authentication and key exchange, which reduces energy consumption in wireless devices. The proposed protocol uses RSA and ECC algorithms differently to make the Handshake protocol more energy efficient. With our proposed protocol, we can save about 25% compared to 1024-bit RSA or 70% compared to 163-bit ECC Handshake protocol. Our proposed protocol can also be easily integrated into the standard WTLS protocol with small modification.