Abstract
New protocol stacks provide wireless IPv6 connectivity down to low power embedded IoT devices. From a security point of view, this leads to high exposure of such IoT devices. Consequently, even though they are highly resource-constrained, these IoT devices need to fulfil similar security requirements as conventional computers. The challenge is to leverage well-known cybersecurity techniques for such devices without dramatically increasing power consumption (and therefore reducing battery lifetime) or the cost regarding memory sizes and required processor performance. Various semiconductor vendors have introduced dedicated hardware devices, so-called secure elements that address these cryptographic challenges. Secure elements provide tamper-resistant memory and hardware-accelerated cryptographic computation support. Moreover, they can be used for mutual authentication with peers, ensuring data integrity and confidentiality, and various other security-related use cases. Nevertheless, publicly available performance figures on energy consumption and execution times are scarce. This paper introduces the concept of secure elements and provides a measurement setup for selected individual cryptographic primitives and a Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) handshake over secure Constrained Application Protocol (CoAPs) in a realistic use case. Consequently, the paper presents quantitative results for the performance of five secure elements. Based on these results, we discuss the characteristics of the individual secure elements and supply developers with the information needed to select a suitable secure element for a specific application.
Highlights
In a typical, straightforward IoT application, a sensor node is sending data to an application server
Looking at the primitives where the secure elements generally exhibited a higher performance as the software-based reference, the performance increase was evident in the execution time
Secure elements can support resource-constrained devices in terms of security by providing tamper-resistant memory, a variety of cryptographic algorithms, and the on-chip generation of key pairs with the private key never leaving the secure element. They allow increasing the overall security of an IoT device
Summary
Straightforward IoT application, a sensor node is sending data to an application server. In many cases, such a node connects to a proprietary, local network with a gateway providing connectivity to the internet by protocol translation. Due to this non-transparent access from the internet, there is little need to implement performance-hungry security measures on the resource-constrained sensor node itself. Cryptographic algorithms demand complex calculations with long execution times when performed on a microcontroller unit (MCU) with little processing power. These algorithms require a high amount of energy and reduce battery lifetime. Conventional security algorithms (e.g., Rivest-Shamir-Adleman RSA) exacerbate this effect as they were
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