Benchmarking Bilinear Pair Cryptography for Resource-Constrained Platforms Using Raspberry Pi

The plentiful and low-cost nature of resource-constrained platforms e.g., Raspberry Pi devices has made them a backbone of modern applications particularly in sectors such as IoT, healthcare, and industrial systems. Nevertheless, they still have some constraints in terms of processing power, memory, and available energy that could limit the deployment of some computationally expensive protocols such as Bilinear Pair Cryptography (BPC). Here, we provide a benchmarking of BPC on a Raspberry Pi, exploring the feasibility and performance of the operations at its core: encryption, decryption, signature generation, and key exchange. To better understand the computational requirements of BPC, we analyze various metrics including execution time, memory use, and energy consumption. The research suggests that lightweight operations such as point addition and hash-to-point mapping apply to real-time applications; while over-resource-expensive tasks such as key exchange need optimization and only infrequent utilization. Suggestions to implement encrypted information systems incorporate the usage of algorithmic enhancements, hardware accelerators, and/or hybrid cryptographic conventions for security-efficiency balance. This work highlights the promise of secure hardware-based solutions such as BPC for limited-resource environments while providing an overview of its usage across systems.