Cryptographic Algorithms in Wearable Communications: An Empirical Analysis
Kristtopher K. Coelho, Danilo Damiao, Guevara Noubir, Alex Borges, Michele Nogueira, José Augusto M. Nacif · IEEE Communications Letters · 2019
In this letter, we assess the practical impact of lightweight block and stream cipher algorithms on power consumption and hardware resources for wearable devices that own low computational resources. Differently from the literature, we present an empirical and hardware-driven evaluation of the most representative encryption algorithms with regard to the requirements of wearable networks. We design and implement a cryptography library useful for wearable devices. Results confirm a strong correlation between the amount of logic/arithmetic operations, assembly instructions and power consumption for the two evaluated platforms, and they highlight the need to design encryption algorithms for wearable devices with high energy consumption efficiency, but strong security level similar to AES.