Towards Designing Energy Efficient Symmetric Key Protocols

Energy consumption by various modern symmetric key encryption protocols (DES, 3-DES, AES and, Blowfish) is studied from an algorithmic perspective. The work is directed towards redesigning or modifying the underlying algorithms for these protocols to make them consume less energy than they currently do. This research takes the approach of reducing energy consumption by parallelizing the consecutive memory accesses of symmetric key encryption algorithms. To achieve parallelization, an existing energy complexity model is applied to symmetric key encryption algorithms. Inspired by the popular DDR3 architecture, the model assumes that main memory is divided into multiple banks, each of which can store multiple blocks. Each block in a bank can only be accessed from a cache of its own, that can hold exactly one block. However all the caches from different banks can be accessed simultaneously. In this research, experiments are conducted to measure the difference in energy consumption by varying the level of parallelization, i.e. variations of, number of banks that can be accessed in parallel. The experimental results show that the higher the level of parallelism, smaller is the energy consumption