Performance evaluation of different encryption schemes on portable and mobile platforms

Abstract

Encryption is becoming an increasingly dominant component in online and mobile applications. While robust security is an important property desired in encryption schemes, it is equally important for such schemes to be highly energy efficient. In this paper we evaluate traditional AES implementations and non-traditional Chaotic Maps based encryption schemes. Our experiments reveal that Chaotic Maps based schemes outperform the traditional AES implementation in terms of CPU usage, encryption speed, and energy consumption. Particularly they consume 300–400 % less CPU, and have over 250% faster encryption speed. In addition, the energy usage of the Chaotic scheme for a given input rate or size is 3 times better compared to the other systems considered. However, the performance also depends on the floating point capability of the platform; a suitable scheme may be chosen depending on the battery and CPU power of platform. The performance results reported in this paper are based on experiments on desktops, laptops, netbooks, and PDAs.