A Performance Evaluation of Data Protection Mechanisms for Resource Constrained IoT Devices

Data Protection is a major research topic concerning the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT systems continue to permeate deeper into our personal lives, where devices sense, process, and store all kinds of data. This poses various challenges to security and privacy aspects, especially to applications running on resource constrained devices. In this paper we evaluate selected, well established data protection mechanisms that enable confidentiality and integrity of data. Specifically, we look into the performance of different cryptographic block and stream ciphers, hashing algorithms, message authentication codes, signature mechanisms, and key exchange protocols executed on state-of-the-art resource constrained devices. By providing limitations and data throughput values, our obtained results ease the calculation of performance/data protection thresholds and facilitate the design and development of secure IoT systems.