Performance evaluation of Raspberry Pi 4 and STM32 Nucleo boards for security-related operations in IoT environments

Abstract

At present, Internet of Things devices are revolutionizing and impacting increasingly more areas of our daily lives. However, there remain doubts related to the lack of sufficient security in the IoT ecosystem. As such devices have limitations in terms of resources such as computational power and batteries, adding security mechanisms is often perceived as an unnecessary burden, slowing the further expansion of IoT-based solutions and applications.In this study, an investigation is conducted to verify the possibility of applying security measures such as strong encryption without hindering the performance of IoT devices. This factor is especially important from the perspective of the European project SILVANUS, in which various IoT application scenarios are envisioned. Taking into account the above, in this work, an extensive experimental performance evaluation campaign is performed using the DTLS-based encryption of network traffic for two popular boards: Raspberry Pi 4 and STM32 Nucleo. The obtained results demonstrate that the utilization of strong encryption is feasible (with some limitations) on IoT devices, but the resulting performance or battery life is not a reasonable argument anymore to leave IoT ecosystems completely insecure.