Characterizing Power and Resource Consumption of Encryption/Decryption in Portable Devices

One way to facilitate private communication is to transform information using encryption. However, encryption algorithms are computation-intensive and power-hungry operations for portable devices, which have computing resource limits and energy constraints. Choosing a suitable encryption-decryption algorithm to implement in portable devices is an important decision that needs to be made in order to secure the exchange of sensitive information without over utilizing the power source, processor and memory in mobile devices. This paper provides a methodology to comprehensively evaluate encryption/decryption algorithms for portable devices based on energy, delay, and footprint. Our result is based on four cutting edge algorithms: RC6, Serpent, Mars, and Twofish, and can help to analyze the power and resource overhead of encryption/decryption, as well as other applications running on mobile devices.