Energy Awareness and Secure Communication Protocols: The Era of Green Cybersecurity

The computational effort required to guarantee the security of a communication, due to the complexity of the cryptographic algorithms, heavily influences the energy consumption and consequently the energy demand of the involved parties. This energy request makes secure communication with low energy consumption a non-trivial issue. The aim of this work is to study, as well as evaluate, the way in which the cryptographic primitives used in secure communication protocols affect the workload of the CPU and, therefore, the energy expenditure of the interacting devices. Through the aforementioned analysis, attention will be focused on the need to consider with greater sensitivity the possibility of operating/undergoing cyber-attacks using the power consumption induced by secure communications. The main focus is to exaggerate the workload of the target devices in order to produce the maximum energy consumption and have a kind of Denial-of-Service attack. The paper studies the contribution of energy consumption introduced by the different part of “secure” primitives within the TLS protocol. As a conclusion, it is shown how Cryptography is often used not in the proper way, i.e., it may introduce costs that are sometimes higher than the value of the “goods” to protect.