Elliptic curve cryptography for real time embedded systems in IoT networks

Internet of things (IoT) is a growing network of embedded devices that can interact with the external environment. With this increasing global network, electronic communication between devices is becoming wireless and ubiquitous. Also, most of the IoT services will be realized as real time embedded systems which rely heavily on security mechanisms. This makes security imperative to embedded devices in IoT. This paper presents security challenges faced by system designers while designing secure embedded systems. The most difficult task for embedded system security is implementation of Public Key Cryptography (PKC). PKC based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) which uses smaller key sizes is efficient for both private and public operations. Moreover, with IoT several embedded devices are becoming interconnected which makes ECC advantageous when you need to embed security. The comparative study suggests that ECC is best suited for resource constrained real time embedded systems in IoT.