Towards energy consumption evaluation of the SSL handshake protocol in mobile communications

Abstract

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol is the most popular security protocol, which provides confidentiality, authentication and integrity protection in Internet transactions. Nowadays, a large portion of them are executed by battery-powered handheld devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), which are severely constrained by their resources, e.g. battery. This work launches an energy-aware study of the SSL Handshake protocol, the most complex part of SSL, considering a number of mobile SSL clients trying to simultaneously establish a secure connection with an SSL server. The proposed analysis is based upon the development of a Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) model augmented with energy rewards, derived by the SSL execution on an iPAQ PDA. The novelty of our approach is that it constructs a model, tunable to communication-related parameters, such as the Bit Error Rate (BER), and verification errors, which overhead client-side energy consumption. In turn, both probabilistic and quantitative verification results are derived. The first ones validate the successful completion of handshakes and the later exhibit the impact of various parameters, such as cipher suites and verification error, on the energy requirements of SSL handshake in mobile communications.