Empirical Study of Standard Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters for IoT Devices

In recent times, security and privacy concerns associated with IoT devices have caught the attention of research community. The problem of securing IoT devices is immensely aggravating due to advancement in technology. These IoT devices are resource-constraint i.e. in terms of power, memory, computation, etc., so they are less capable to secure themselves. So we need a better approach to secure IoT devices within the limited resources. Several studies state that for these lightweight IoT devices Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) suits perfectly. But there are several elliptic curve domain parameter standards, which may be used for different security levels. When any ECC based product is deployed then the selection of a suitable elliptic curve standard according to usability is become very important. So we have to choose one suitable standard domain parameter for the required security level. In this paper, two different elliptic curve standard domain parameters named secp256k1 and secp192k1 proposed by an industry consortium named Standards for Efficient Cryptography Group (SECG) [1] are implemented and then analyzed their performances metrics. The performance of each domain parameter is measured in computation time.