Computing Cryptographic Algorithms in Portable and Embedded Devices

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Pairings get more research attentions for computational constraint devices such as Pocket PCs and wireless sensors. As a result, computational evaluations of various cryptographic algorithms are highly desired to guide researchers to design effective communication protocols. In order to achieve this goal, we conduct comparative performance evaluations for Pocket PC and wireless sensors to study the computational ability to process cryptographic functions, such as point multiplication, Pairings, AES, and hash functions. Our study shows that current Pocket PC level devices are capable to process computational intensive cryptographic functions, such as Parings. However, purely software cryptographic solutions require long time to process cryptographic algorithms and special optimization methods must be used to improve the computation performance.