Benchmarking message authentication code functions for mobile computing

With the increased popularity of both Internet and mobile computing, several security mechanisms, each using various cryptography functions, have been proposed to ensure that future generation Internets will guarantee both authenticity and data integrity. These functions are usually computationally intensive resulting in large communication delays and energy consumption for the power-limited mobile systems. The functions are also implemented in variety of ways with different resource demands, and may run differently depending on platform. Since communications within the next generation Internet are to be secured, it is important for a mobile system to be suited to the function that provide sufficient communication security while maintaining both power-efficiency and delay requirements. This paper benchmarks mobile systems with cryptographic functions used in message authentication. This paper also introduces a metric, namely apparent processing, that makes benchmarking meaningful for mobile systems with multiple processing cores or utilizing hardware-based cryptography. In addition, this paper discusses some of evaluated functions' computational characteristics observed through benchmarking on selected mobile computing architectures.