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After four years of testing, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced its preferred “lightweight cryptography” encryption method, designed to work on low-power IoT devices.
Connected IoT devices, such as wearables, smart home gadgets and even vehicle-to-vehicle technologies are all around us, and the key to their success is their small size. However, this brings its own challenges, including less powerful chips than we would normally see in a smartphone or computer. These are less able to deal with traditionally heavier encryption methods, hence the introduction of a new standard.
Optimized encryption allows smaller devices to handle sensitive personal information, which can be great for wearable users who want to access their health data, for example.
ASCON encryption
The program saw a total of 57 proposals, which were later reduced to 10 finalists (opens in new tab). An announcement explains:
“The decision was challenging, as most of the finalists demonstrated performance advantages over NIST standards on several target platforms without introducing security vulnerabilities.”
finally, ASCON was chosen (opens in new tab) because of its flexibility, energy efficiency and its ability to run smoothly on less powerful hardware. It was also earned for its longevity, having been around since 2014 and having endured “years of scrutiny by cryptographers”.
NIST computer scientist, Kerry McKay, explained (opens in new tab) that “one of the ASCON variants offers some degree of resistance to the kind of attack a powerful quantum computer could perform,” indicating impressive resilience.
That said, NIST has already done that began working on quantum-secure public-key cryptographic algorithmswhich opened with 82 proposals.
What this means going forward is that there will soon be a significant increase in the number of devices that can securely share information as the era of seamless connectivity approaches.