Resource Usage Evaluation of the PHOTON Hash Function
Tshegofatso Mangole, Albert S. J. Helberg, Kishor Krishnan Nair · 2022
Advances in ubiquitous computing have led to the use of the Internet of Things (IoT), which consists of resource-constrained devices. The use of constrained devices raises significant security concerns. Since the IoT comprises devices with limited resources, primitive cryptographic algorithms are not practical. It is essential to ensure the integrity of the data used in IoT applications. As a result, many lightweight algorithms have been developed to address this challenge, leaving developers and researchers uncertain of how and when to choose one algorithm over the other. Evaluation of these algorithms is necessary as it serves as a guideline to the developers/researchers to help them choose an algorithm that meets their application needs. This paper evaluates the memory usage and latency of a widely used lightweight hash function called PHOTON on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B used as an IoT node in two test cases: Test Case 1 analyzes and evaluates the performance when the data log file used as an input to the hash increases in size. Test case 2 studies how adapting the input rate (i.e., 128,160, and 176 bits) affects performance. The experimental results show that memory consumption increased for some variants when the file size increased. When the input rate was modified, the variants performed better compared to unmodified variants. It was also observed that variants with less latency do not necessarily have less memory; there was no linear correlation between latency and memory consumption for some of the PHOTON variants.