They chose Ascon which is a good set of same sponge-based cryptographic functions if you don't have hardware acceleration for AES or the CPU resources for chacha20 which is the intention of the standard. The security is 128-bits (comparable to AES-128).
This is pretty cool. But IOT tends to fail hard on key agreement. And nothing here solves that. This seems to pretty much require a pre installed key, otherwise the overhead of securely installing a key would probably nullify the advantage of this encryption.
Are these for garage doors and doorbells? Those devices could definitely use more security (it's not hard to stuff a proper TLS stack in a microcontroller but manufacturers balk at even putting something as cheap as a ESP32 in their BOM).
I wonder whether this is backdoored by NSA as well
Wikipedia says Ascon has 320 bits of state and uses 5 bit s-boxes. That’s tiny compared to sha-256 or Blake2. One would think a pre image attack would be much more tractable at that scale.
If these primitives are less resource intensive than what we use today with the same level of security, then why don't we just use these everywhere? If they are not as secure, then why would be use these anywhere?
Why not use chacha20 or xtea for embedded devices? They are lighter than AES..
While I know people where a little sceptical of it. I honestly liked the speck cipher that was published.
This cipher is a lot more heavy.
A land shanty is just called a song. It's protective cryptography or not. Binary.
Really glad a sponge function won, they are a big step forward in terms of crypto engineering!
s/NIST/NSA/g
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> If lightweight cryptography was a good idea, we’d just call it “cryptography.”
https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1948476801824485606