Tiny Security : Evaluating energy   use for security in an IoT application

IoT devices are increasingly used in the process of gathering scientific data. In environmental monitoring IoT devices can be used as remote sensing devices to collect information about e.g. temperature. To keep data reliable, various security aspects have to be considered. Constrained devices are limited by memory size and battery life, a security solution has to be developed with this in mind. In this study an IoT security solution was developed in collaboration with a research group in environmental science at Umeå University. We selected commonly used algorithms and compared them with the goal to provide authentication and integrity for an IoT application, while minimizing energy use running on an Atmega 1284P. The results showed that the encryption algorithm AES-256-GCM is a good choice for a total security solution. AES-256-GCM provides authenticated encryption with additional data while, in relation to the other tested algorithms, using energy at a low level and leaving a small program size footprint