Evaluation and Comparison of Real-time Network Latency Special Thanks to Anthony Fascenda, CEO KoolSpan Inc. Mobile applications are an essential part of modern society and they are becoming critical to society everyday. In fact in parts of the world, mobile applications have replaced money and credit cards for paying for everything from sodas to restaurant bills. You can trade stock, access your bank, order movies - virtually anything from your mobile application. All of this requires security and the more critical the application the stronger security that is needed. However, for security to work, security needs to be as invisible as possible to the user. One of the most critical factors to this usable security is the time it takes to provide security. The time it takes to provide security and communication is its latency and this project aims to quantify and evaluate these latencies. Conclusion Based on all the data collected, it was found that the addition of security was not nearly as big a factor in determining latency as protocol or network choices. The GPRS network displayed the most latency, to the point where a voice conversation could not realistically be held. However, this is an older network, and it is likely that any new programs would operate exclusively over 3G networks instead. All other networks that were tested showed round trip latencies that were more than adequate for a voice conversation. Using TCP caused more latency than UDP, presumably due to multiple retry attempts that didn't occur using UDP. This only became significant over the cellular network however as retries required more trips over the slower network. By Phillip Marlow

Cellular Interceptors SYN/ACK Method Using this method, round trip latency can be calculated without the need to synchronize the clocks of each computer. This allows the program to give latencies which are accurate to within a few microseconds. Two computers establish a connection. Intercept units start at $500 and can cost well over $1,000,000 depending on form and functionality. Depending on the country, intercepted cellular audio can be purchased for less than $5/minute or on a per day rate. SYN The first message is a SYN packet, encoding a start time and requesting a response. ACK The returned message, or ACK packet, contains the original start time, which can be used to calculate round trip latency. These interceptors work across all cellular carriers, and many work passively, meaning that they cannot be detected and don’t interfere with the network. Some also provide triangulation features allowing the interceptor to output a person’s location to within a few meters. KoolSpan TrustChip Peer-to-Peer Authentication Streaming Encryption Engine Industry Standard Interface to Host Device Hardened FPGA On-chip Crypto Tamper resistant