Evaluation of cryptographic primitives on modern microcontroller platforms

Abstract

Security is an important issue, sometimes critical, when it comes to embedded applications such as industrial, Internet of Things or wearable devices. Due to the limited resources available, adding modern cryptography features may be difficult, even unfeasible in some cases. In this paper, we evaluate the different implementations (mbedTLS, TomCrypt, wolfSSL) of popular cryptographic algorithms (AES, SHA, ChaCha, Poly1305, RSA) on modern, 32-bit microcontrollers. We present the results: space requirements, memory usage, speed and power consumption on three popular, representative ARM Cortex-M platforms. We analyze and compare them to help embedded application developers in choosing the tools without too much compromises in security.