Characterizing the Performance of Security Functions in Mobile Computing Systems

The next-generation mobile networks will be equipped with sophisticated communication security, ensuring the safety and authenticity of the transmitted information. However, many of today´s prominent security measures are cryptography-based and present several operational challenges in mobile computing systems. Thus, enforcing security measures can greatly affect communication performance, particularly, when it comes to time-based guarantees such as delay and jitter. Moreover, mobile computing systems have limited energy sources, which can be depleted quickly by improperly enforcing such resource-intensive operations. Therefore, it becomes vital to understand the computational characteristics of security measures from a communication perspective. By observing these characteristics, it may be possible for existing and future mobile systems to be suited with security functions that provide the sufficient communication security while maintaining both the power-efficiency and the delay/jitter requirements. In this paper, we propose a benchmarking environment for evaluating cryptography-based security functions from a communication perspective. The paper investigates how mobile systems´ design and operation characteristics have a significant impact on the computational characteristics of security functions. The paper explores the evaluation metrics that can be used in benchmarking security functions within various communication settings and proposes the use of a simple and effective delay-based metric for the benchmarking process. The computational characteristics of some selected security functions are evaluated under the proposed benchmarking environment and presented in this paper. While the main focus of the work is the widely utilized mobile communication settings, the proposed evaluation scheme can be applied for other communication settings and for noncryptographic security functions.