Measuring the energy consumption of cyber security

The Internet is a core tool for developing commercial and social relationships. As a consequence, cyber security must be properly assessed, for instance, to face new and sophisticated threats. To deliver large-scale services, proper countermeasures characterized by a non-negligible energetic impact have to be pursued. From this perspective, this article proposes to investigate the energy required by the most popular cryptographic algorithms. The collected measures are used to model relationships between power drains and size of the key or offered load via a black box approach. Results can also be used to prevent classical traffic analysis campaigns.