Evaluation of real-time aspects of multiparty security on low-power mobile devices

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluated the performance of key exchange protocols on mobile devices. The wide usage of low power mobile phones causes mobile computing to spread rapidly and an increasing number of networked applications are developed for these devices. One important consideration in this scenario is data security. This is particularly important in secure groupware, collaborative or multiuser applications where simultaneous communication with multiple parties must be securely maintained. One key component of building secure data channels are computationally expensive key exchange protocols. Based on the benchmark of several asymmetric algorithms on mobile phones, we theoretically analyzed the speed of authenticated multiparty key agreement protocols with different designs and compared them with each other. The results were confirmed by a protocol benchmark in our testbed.