Feasibility characterization of cryptographic primitives for constrained (wearable) IoT devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) employs smart devices as its building blocks for developing a ubiquitous communication framework. It thus supports a wide variety of application domains, including public safety, healthcare, education, and public transportation. While offering a novel communication paradigm, IoT finds its requirements closely connected to the security issues. The role of security following the fact that a new type of devices known as wearables constitute an emerging area. This paper delivers an applicability study of the state-of-the-art cryptographic primitives for wearable IoT devices, including the pairing-based cryptography. Pairing-based schemes are well-recognized as fundamental enablers for many advanced cryptographic applications, such as privacy protection and identity-based encryption. To deliver a comprehensive view on the computational power of modern wearable devices (smart phones, watches, and embedded devices), we perform an evaluation of a variety of them utilizing bilinear pairing for real-time communication. In order to deliver a complete picture, the obtained bilinear pairing results are complemented with performance figures for classical cryptography (such as block ciphers, digital signatures, and hash functions). Our findings show that wearable devices of today have the needed potential to efficiently operate with cryptographic primitives in real time. Therefore, we believe that the data provided during this research would shed light on what devices are more suitable for certain cryptographic operations.