Analysis of ECDSA's Computational Impact on IoT Network Performance

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the world. On the one hand, its rapid integration into many systems is making automation easier, but on the other hand dependence of many processes on IoT is also making the IoT an attractive target for exploitation. One of the attacks that IoT devices can suffer from is device impersonation. To verify that the sender of a piece of information is who it claims to be, digital signatures are a solution. Applying digital signatures requires some overhead, and that overhead may impact the performance of an IoT network. In this paper, we observed the computational impact of using the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) to create and verify IoT devices' digital signatures. We used two criteria to evaluate the performance of our small IoT network: the packet loss and the average time needed to sign and verify a packet in a small IoT network. We also analyzed the same system without using digital signatures. Our evaluations show that in a small IoT sensor network, ECDSA computational impact is quite low.