Performance of Digital Signature Schemes on Mobile Devices

Exchanges of information (with various types of documents, images and movies) among mobile devices are very common nowadays because these devices have been widely used in people's daily lives. The fact that the information being handled may be sensitive and valuable has increased people's awareness in the need for mobile security. In the context of digital communications, the common security requirements include authentication integrity and nonrepudiation. The standard solution is a technique from the cryptographic community known as digital signature. In practice, the solution is quite adequate, since the personal computers of today are perfectly capable of signature generation and verification. In this chapter, we plan to investigate the situation in which everything goes mobile. The main difference is that mobile devices are limited by their computational power and battery capacity. Specifically, we conduct performance evaluations on two digital signature schemes. We examine the computation time and energy consumption in the signature generation and verification process on two mobile devices. Our results show that modern mobile devices are capable of handling digital signatures.