Certain investigations on energy efficient elliptic curve cryptographic methods for mobile hand held devices

Abstract

The digitalcommunication is ruling the world by using engineering and technology. Communication between two devices using analog is now obsolete. Digital devices are being used for communicating with each other to make the humanity comfortable, and enjoyable. The devices involved in sending and receiving digital data offer mobility and portability, because of the availability of small yet powerful electronic components. Most of the digital devices are mobile as well as hand-held. Since the data that are transmitted by these mobile hand-held devices are travelling in the open air, they are very vulnerable to malicious activities like message tapping, message alteration, message replay and other kinds of threats. Hence these mobile devices are provided with security sub system to prevent, get rid of, or at least to mitigate the attacks on sensitive information transmitted. In the epoch of internet-based environment, secured data transfer is vital between mobile hand-held devices and internetservices. As internetenvironment connected to heterogeneous network, they become susceptible to attacks and therefore it is necessitated a mechanism to authenticate the data transmission in these environments. The security protocols and the cryptographic algorithms used to offer the authentication frameworks impose heavy requirement on computing power which in turn requires more electrical energy to operate. This energy expenditure poses a supplementary performance bottleneck while providing a secure communication. Hence, it is necessary to implement an energy efficient cryptographic algorithm that accomplishes minimum energy consumption with high level of security. In this thesis, the implementation of energy efficient authentication protocol for mobile hand-held devices is discussed. The authentication of messages between communicating principalsis inevitable to identify whether the message is sent by the person who the message claimed to. Various authentication protocols have been proposed and are being analyzed by researchers for their efficiency in terms of time, space, and energy requirements. Cryptographic algorithms are being used for exchange of sensitive data. The key size, the number bits of a key, is an important factor to approximate the security strength, a cryptographic algorithm offers. But larger the key size, higher the computation power, leading to fast drain of battery life. To stretch the battery life time, the cryptographic algorithm should consume minimum energy possible at the same time should not compromise the accepted level of security. Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithms are the two widely used asymmetric algorithms. The RSA algorithm is based on prime number factorization problem which is highly complex to crack. The very strength of RSA, factoring large size keys are difficult to factor becomes the weakness of RSA when it is being used to transmit large amount of sensitive data. Instead of RSA, ECC was invented to provide security in mobile environment with lower computing power and battery power usage without any compromise in security. The level of security achieved by RSA with key size of 1024 bits can be achieved by ECC with key size of 160 bits. newline