Measurement of Symmetric Cipher on Low Power Devices for Power Grids

Abstract

The symmetric ciphers are often used in low power devices for its low requirements. This article provides a measurement of AES-128 cipher, which should be used for secure communication in power grid (smart grid) networks. We are using as low power devices the microcontroller MSP430 from Texas Instruments. These measurements, deal in this article, should help with implementation of the whole concept of encryption. Concretely, it shows the space left for the other algorithms (as for example elliptic curves algorithm for key distribution, communication protocols etc.)