Analysis and Optimization of TLS-based Security Mechanisms for Low Power IoT Systems
Frederik Lauer, Carl Christian Rheinländer, Claus Kestel, Norbert Wehn · 2020
Security has been valued as one of the most critical issues in the Internet of Things (IoT). The usage of cryptographic hardware accelerators is state of the art to improve the energy efficiency of security-related protocols like TLS. This way, feasible battery runtimes are ensured for resource-constrained IoT edge devices.However, the enhancement provided by the accelerator is not propagated in the same magnitude to the TLS handshake process.Hence, to further improve the security mechanism at TLS level, a holistic analysis of the IoT system is required to track down bottlenecks that have been revealed due to unilateral cryptographic optimization.In this paper, we present appropriate methods to identify further limiting factors and propose corresponding optimizations. We show how that overall energy demand for ephemeral TLS handshakes can be reduced by 50% and the related latency by about one order of magnitude compared to related work.