Comparative performance analysis of public-key cryptographic operations in the WTLS handshake protocol

− The increasing importance of mobile devices as a mean to exchange information in wireless environments has prompted the need to establish secure sessions to avoid potential security attacks. The Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS) protocol provides the mechanism for obtaining secure sessions using public-key cryptography. WTLS supports two public key cryptosystems: RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). Nowadays, RSA is the most popular option for implementing confidential data exchange in applications such as e-commerce and mobile e-commerce. However, it has been theoretically argued that bit by bit, ECC provides much more security than RSA at a lower computational cost. In this paper we derive an analytical performance model of the WTLS handshake protocol when using the two aforementioned public-key cryptosystems. The performance figures predicted by our model were contrasted with experimental results acquired from a real wireless implementation of the said protocol. The obtained results confirms our model theoretical predictions providing experimental evidence that ECC indeed outperforms RSA in realistic wireless secure scenarios.