Power consumption of TLS : How the additional "S" in HTTPS impacts the power consumption of power-pluggend devices

Abstract

The increasing relevance of security within the Internet has led to a growing demand to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data. Nowadays, former HTTP traffic is encrypted and is now referred to as HTTPS traffic. Thereby, TLS is used to protect data in transit and has become a state-of-the-art protocol. Research in the field of energy consumption of secure communication channels has become increasingly important in scientific studies since the early 2000s. However, it predominantly focused on Internet-of-Things devices and battery-powered devices, e.g. smartphones, to increase battery life. In recent years, energy efficiency is becoming more important through the growing environmental awareness and climate change. The field of information security has to provide energy-efficient solutions now, not only for battery-oriented devices, but also those directly connected with the power grid, e.g. servers or PCs. The goal of this thesis is to determine the impact on energy consumption encrypting HTTP with TLS, i.e. HTTPS. In order to achieve this, we pursue a two phased approach. In the first phase, we evaluate various measurement environments for this purpose. In the second phase, we conduct a comparative analysis between different cipher suites regarding their energy efficiency and execution time. This research is one of the first to conduct such an analysis on a plug-socket device. Our goal is to determine whether and which cipher suites have a lower energy consumption and might pursue the way for energy savings in the future.