  The majority of available wearable devices require communication with
Internet servers for data analysis and storage, and rely on a paired smartphone
to enable secure communication. However, wearable devices are mostly equipped
with WiFi network interfaces, enabling direct communication with the Internet.
Secure communication protocols should then run on these wearables itself, yet
it is not clear if they can be efficiently supported. In this paper, we show
that wearable devices are ready for direct and secure Internet communication by
means of experiments with both controlled and Internet servers. We observe that
the overall energy consumption and communication delay can be reduced with
direct Internet connection via WiFi from wearables compared to using
smartphones as relays via Bluetooth. We also show that the additional HTTPS
cost caused by TLS handshake and encryption is closely related to number of
parallel connections, and has the same relative impact on wearables and
smartphones.
