On perspective of security and privacy-preserving solutions in the internet of things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings together a large variety of devices of different platforms, computational capacities and functionalities. The network heterogeneity and the ubiquity of IoT devices introduce increased demands on both security and privacy protection. Therefore, the cryptographic mechanisms must be strong enough to meet these increased requirements but, at the same time, they must be efficient enough for the implementation on constrained devices. In this paper, we present a detailed assessment of the performance of the most used cryptographic algorithms on constrained devices that often appear in IoT networks. We evaluate the performance of symmetric primitives, such as block ciphers, hash functions, random number generators, asymmetric primitives, such as digital signature schemes, and privacy-enhancing schemes on various microcontrollers, smart-cards and mobile devices. Furthermore, we provide the analysis of the usability of upcoming schemes, such as the homomorphic encryption schemes, group signatures and attribute-based schemes.