Secure Smart Home Using ECC

Amin, Sunaina (2025) Secure Smart Home Using ECC. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

A smart home is embracing the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) at a rapid rate across the world. In the world, the number of connected IoT devices is expected to reach 27 billion by 2025 (IoT Analytics, 2024) and 29.4 billion by 2030 (Statista, 2024). There is also a rapid growth in the regional markets; in Thailand alone, the smart home users are projected to have more than 5.6 million users by the year 2029 (Statista, 2024b). The growth brings about major cyber threats, especially in device authentication and resistance against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Traditional cryptography, including Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), is becoming less applicable to IoT resources due to its high key size, high computation, and energy usage.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a more effective alternative. According to elliptic curve mathematics, ECC has the same security level as RSA using significantly smaller key sizes (e.g., a 256-bit ECC key is as secure as a 3072-bit RSA key). The efficiency saves on the computation cost, minimizes power consumption, and creates shorter signatures, which makes ECC especially useful in a smart home where devices are running on limited resources.

This study invents and tests an ECC-based mutual authentication protocol that has been coded in Python in Visual Studio Code, with MQTT communications as the publisher and subscriber device to recreate a smart home IoT setting. As a comparison, RSA had also been implemented under the same conditions. The assessment was based on authentication time, CPU and memory consumption, signature size, throughput, and estimated energy consumption. The findings consistently show that ECC outperforms RSA in terms of faster authentication, lower memory costs, and reduced energy expenditure.

The paper finds that ECC provides a scalable, energy-efficient implementation of RSA in securing IoT smart homes by providing increased device authentication and performance in limited environments. Additional work in this field can involve hardware testing at the platform level, support on platforms like the Raspberry Pi or ESP32, support of lightweight protocols such as CoAP, and investigating hybrid ECC post-quantum strategies.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email McCabe, Liam UNSPECIFIED
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Elliptic Curve Cryptography; Smart Homes; Internet of Things; Lightweight Authentication
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Electronic computers. Computer science Q Science > QA Mathematics > Computer software > Computer Security T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Computer software > Computer Security T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering > Telecommunications > Computer networks > Internet of things
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Cyber Security
Depositing User:	Ciara O'Brien
Date Deposited:	17 Aug 2026 13:59
Last Modified:	17 Aug 2026 13:59
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/9525

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