Abstract:
Throughout the world, 8.74 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been deployed,
ranging from household thermostats to sensors in remote areas. However, these IoT devices
are resource-constrained, not only in computational speed, but often in available electrical
power. Computational offloading can provide significant power and latency savings, but often
exposes data and systems to security breaches. Researchers have proposed a plethora of
protocols to address these security gaps. These published works focus solely on theoretical
power and latency savings and do not include end-to-end implementation or data. Furthermore,
few, if any, of these protocols have been fielded by either academic or commercial
projects. This paper presents the results from the end-to-end implementation of an encryption
offloading protocol. Latency and power data were collected to enable comparisons of
security computations done solely on the IoT device and partially outsourced to a nearby
device. Using the analysis of this data and lessons learned from the end-to-end implementation,
the author of this research also created a generic software library to implement
computational offloading to the edge. The new software library enabled the integration of
a known, secure and verifiable computing technique into the encryption offloading protocol.
