Power evaluation methods for data encryption algorithms

With the increasingly extensive application of networking technology, security of network becomes significant than ever before. Encryption algorithm plays a key role in construction of a secure network system. However, the encryption algorithm implemented on resource-constrained device is difficult to achieve ideal performance. The issue of power consumption becomes essential to performance of data encryption algorithm. Many methods are proposed to evaluate the power consumption of encryption algorithms yet the authors do not ensure which one is effective. In this study, they give a comprehensive review for the methods of power evaluation. They then design a series of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of three main types of methods by implementing several traditional symmetric encryption algorithms on a workstation. The experimental results show that external measurement and software profiling are more accurate than that of uninterruptible power system battery. The improvement of power consumption is 27.44 and 33.53% which implies the method of external measurement and software profiling is more effective in power consumption evaluation.