The rapid increase of the number of resource-constrained devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) through shared infrastructures poses certain challenges for the achievement of robust and manageable secure communications, especially in critical environments. The efficient realization of end-to-end, application layer security protocols supporting also public key cryptography mechanisms is for a long time a quest in the world of resource constrained embedded devices. The Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman over COSE (EDHOC) is a recently developed key establishment protocol that can work over any layer. The main scope of this work is to present the design and performance evaluation of an embedded EDHOC module developed for the open source Contiki-NG OS, investigating the runtime and memory footprint overhead associated with an implementation for modern, ARM-based resource constrained devices.
