[Ace] quiz question on energy cost of public key computations (was: Re: Symmetric Keys Don't Scale ... was Aw: Re: New Version of Proposed Charter)

Dear Olaf:

I have a quiz question for you all:

What is the estimated *total* energy cost of carrying out 30 billion elliptic curve scalar multiplications on RFID-style devices using a best-of-breed hardware only implementation. For simplicity, let us consider 163-bit binary curves. We will ignore any other aspects.

Answer options:
a) 1 kWh; {10c}
b) 1 thousand kWh;
c) 1 million kWh;
d) 1 billion kWh.

There are no prizes. However, I hope this puts the contribution that best-of-breed crypto computations make to global warming (vs. the contribution hereto of email traffic regarding the ACE charter and activities) into perspective.

Note: This question was triggered by Cisco's and Intel's forecast that by 2020 there would be 30 billion interconnected objects swarming the planet.

Best regards, Rene

[excerpt of your email as of February 7, 2014]
I do not see why there is any difference between symmetric and asymmetric keys (except for the additional contribution to global warming of the latter
option.)

On 2/7/2014 6:56 AM, Olaf Bergmann wrote:
> Paul,
>
> Paul Lambert <paul@nymbus.net> writes:
>
>> Identity should be based on the demonstrated ownership of a public keys.
> I think this is an important point in your arguing for public keys. You
> want them as identifier used in authentication.
>
> First of all, as was discussed before, we should take into consideration
> that the devices' identities are given by a set of attributes. This may
> be a set of just one element, including the public key as its value, in
> some scenarios but this is not always the case. For example, a second
> element in this list may be the device group identifier.
>
> And, given that a device has some initial keying material (this is a
> precondition for ace but how this happens is out of scope), I do not see
> why there is any difference between symmetric and asymmetric keys
> (except for the additional contribution to global warming of the latter
> option.) -- I completely understand the business model for chip
> manufacturers and equipment vendors behind using asymmetric keys. And I
> understand why these are useful when certificates and PKIX are used. But
> in a distributed environment without a central authentication and
> authorization server, what is their benefit?
>
> Gruesse
> Olaf
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