June 26, 2008 - This technical report is a sequel to Technical Report TR-2005-145 , which introduced Sizzle -- the world's smallest secure web server. Sizzle can run on "mote"-like devices that are powered by 8- or 16-bit processors and have as little as 4-10KB of RAM. Sizzle implements the Internet's dominant security protocol, SSL, used to protect sensitive transactions like e-commerce and on-line banking. It is designed to be embeddable in a wide array of tiny devices including home appliances, utility meters, personal medical devices, lighting fixtures and industrial sensors allowing these devices to be monitored and controlled securely across the Internet.

This paper presents the first empirical energy analysis of the SSL protocol running on highly constrained devices. Its main contributions are:

The extra energy cost of encrypting and authenticating application data with SSL is around 15% in our experiments. With the addition of application-level, duty-cycle based approach to low-power listening for incoming service requests, a pair of alkaline batteries can power Sizzle for over a year under a variety of application scenarios.

For more information:

Related work at Sun Labs: