Performance evaluation of chaotic and conventional encryption on portable and mobile platforms

Abstract

Protection of private user information in computers and communication networks has been one of the major concerns during the last decade. It has become even more critical due to pervasive use of smart mobile devices, and is exacerbated due to their limited processing and battery power needed to manage complex encryption schemes, particularly for real-time multimedia applications (audio and video). Secure multimedia communication systems require processing of huge amounts of information at speeds ranging from Kilobits/sec (Kbs) to the order of Megabits/sec (Mbs). Provisioning of security for such large volumes of data in mobile devices may be simply infeasible when the complexity of related operations is beyond the processing limit of such devices. In this chapter we evaluate the performance of different encryption schemes, including AES implementations and non-conventional chaotic encryption on different architectures. Our experiments reveal that chaos-based schemes outperform the conventional AES implementation in terms of CPU usage, encryption speed, and energy consumption. Particularly they consume 300-400% less CPU power, and have over 250% faster encryption speed. However, the performance also depends on the floating point capability of the platform; a suitable scheme may be chosen depending on the CPU power of platform. The performance results reported in this chapter are based on experiments on contemporary desktops, laptops, netbooks, and cell phones (Nokia N800 and N900). © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.