Security and Performance of Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Resource-limited Environments: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Nowadays, the usage of constrained-resources devices like sensors and IoT devices are increasing rapidly. These devices often deal with sensitive data and simultaneously have limited storage and low processing capabilities. That means achieving protocols with high levels of security can be relatively difficult in these limited environments, as we find ourselves faced with a trade-off between performance and security. Therefore, the ultimate goal is to find a cryptographic scheme which achieve good levels of security and consume little resources. This study seeks to analyze the performance and security of Elliptic Curve Cryptography in resource-limited environments by comparing ECC to other public key cryptographic schemes over key pair generation, key exchange and digital signature primitives. The comparison results of this paper promote using ECC in resource-limited environments and show the significant differences between the time and memory requirements of ECC comparing to other public key schemes especially when the security requirements increase.