Performance measurement of secure TFTP protocol for smart embedded devices

Abstract

Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) is a client server protocol for transferring files between networked devices. A TFTP client can upload or download files to or from a remote server using the UDP transport protocol. Although it is simple to implement and is largely used in network booting, the TFTP provides no security features and it lacks most of the features of regular File Transfer Protocol (FTP). It does not support authentication or encryption process and allows public files to be accessible to all users on the network. In this work we propose to incorporate security into TFTP by the use of lightweight symmetric encryption for data encryption and asymmetric encryption for secret key exchange protocol that can be implemented in smart embedded devices. The performance of the secure TFTP in transferring files was measured as the packet size of encrypted data was varied from 32 bytes to 4096 bytes. A modification of packet header in the TFTP packet was required in order to implement encryption algorithms such as El-Gamal encryption scheme. The outcome of our experiment in ARM Embedded RaspberryPi shows that by adding encryption scheme or attestation in the TFTP protocol, it will not render the TFTP performance due to having an implementation of security protocol.