Comparative Performance Evaluation of Key Exchange Protocols

Abstract

The paper presents a comparative performance evaluation of typical constructions of authenticated key exchange protocols using asymmetric and/or symmetric cryptography. The protocols are implemented using JAKE, a lightweight Java frame-work for prototype implementation and experimental analysis of secure-channel protocols, including attacks and performance evaluation. JAKE uses the standard library of cryptographic classes included in OpenJDK. The experiments were carried out for different cryptographic algorithms and security levels. The comparative analysis demonstrates the important performance gains achieved by switching from Finite-Field Cryptography (FFC) to Elliptic-Curve Cryptography (ECC), for Diffie-Hellman (DH) key agreement, signatures, and public-key certificates. The algorithms based on ECC reduce substantially the performance gap between authentication using symmetric cryptography and pre-shared secret keys (faster, but with limited applications) and authentication using asymmetric cryptography and public-key certificates. They also show a substantial performance degradation from 128-bit to 192-bit or 256-bit security, so the security level should be adjusted according to application requirements.