Workload Characterization of Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Other Network Security Algorithms for Constrained Environments

Abstract

Today, security is one of the foremost concerns in the transmission of data over the internet or over any other network. Also, in recent years, there are great speculations regarding cryptographic algorithms which are suitable for constrained environments, like mobile devices, where computing resources, power availability, communication bandwidth and available memory are limited, as the number of mobile users are increasing at a very fast pace due to which m-commerce is on boom and today accounts for around 50% of all the e-commerce traffic and this percentage is expected to increase in future. In this project, I will select a public key cryptosystem suitable for such environment and study their workload characteristics. Particularly, I will study and discuss about elliptic curve cryptography algorithms, which is an emerging public key cryptographic system for constrained environments. This allows fast software implementations because of reduced key sizes and computational efficiency, while preserving the same security levels as were offered by previous integer-based public-key algorithms. I will characterize the operations needed by elliptic curve cryptography for different key sizes and different levels of software optimization. I will try to show that this algorithm can be implemented efficiently using very less resources.