International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Due to the numerous security and privacy risks, applications deployed in wireless networks require strong cryptographic protection. Reducing the energy cost of cryptographic algorithms and protocols that run on wireless embedded devices, is a crucial requirement when developing security and privacy solutions for wireless networks. The goal of this work is to give an insight to the global energy cost of secure wireless communications. We will compare the energy cost of different wireless standards and a wide range of cryptographic primitives. To illustrate these numbers, we will evaluate the energy consumption of several authentication schemes for RFID. The results show that both computation and communication cost are important factors in the energy budget, and clearly connected to the security and privacy properties of the wireless applications.