BSD-based elliptic curve cryptography for the open Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of everyday physical objects with the Internet and their representation in the digital world. Due to the connectivity of physical objects with the untrusted Internet, security has become an important pillar for the success of IoT-based services. Things in the IoT are resource-constrained devices with limited processing and storage capabilities. Often, these things are battery powered and connected through lossy wireless links. Therefore, lightweight and efficient ways of providing secure communication in the IoT are needed. In this context, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is considered as a strong candidate to provide security in the IoT while being able to function in constrained environments. In this paper we present a lightweight implementation and evaluation of ECC for the Contiki OS. For fast, secure and cost-effective mass development of IoT-based services by different vendors, it is important that the IoT protocols are implemented and released as open source and open licensed. To the best of our knowledge our ECC is the first lightweight BSD-licensed ECC for the IoT devices. We show the feasibility of our implementation by a thorough performance analysis using several implementations and optimization algorithms. Moreover, we evaluate it on a real IoT hardware platform.