Performance Evaluation of Primitives for Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography on Current Smart-Cards and Smart-Phones

The paper deals with the implementation and benchmarking of cryptographic primitives on contemporary smart-cards and smartphones. The goal of the paper is to analyze the demands of today’s common theoretical cryptographic constructions used in privacy-enhancing schemes and to find out whether they can be practically implemented on off-the-shelf hardware. We evaluate the performance of all major platforms of programmable smart-cards (JavaCards, .NET cards and MultOS cards) and three reference Android devices (a tablet and two smart-phones). The fundamental cryptographic primitives frequently used in advanced cryptographic constructions, such as user-centric attribute-based protocols and anonymous credential systems, are evaluated. In addition, we show how our results can be used for the estimation of the performance of existing and future cryptographic protocols. Therefore, we provide not only benchmarks of all modern programmable smart-card platforms but also a tool for the performance estimation of privacy-enhancing schemes which are based on popular zero-knowledge proof of knowledge protocols.