Ascon for Small Device Protection

 Key need, given how many of these is currently remotely connected.

 US NIST adopts Ascon algorithms for small device protection  By David Manners 16th February 2023, For Light Weight Crypto, ElectronicsWeekly

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has chosen Ascon, a group of cryptographic  algorithms, to protect data generated by small devices.

Ascon’s algorithms will be published as NIST’s lightweight cryptography standard later in 2023.

The chosen algorithms are designed to protect information created and transmitted by the IoT, including its myriad tiny sensors and actuators.

They are also designed for other miniature technologies such as implanted medical devices, stress detectors inside roads and bridges, and keyless entry fobs for vehicles. .

“The world is moving toward using small devices for lots of tasks ranging from sensing to identification to machine control, and because these small devices have limited resources, they need security that has a compact implementation,” says NIST scientist Kerry McKay, “these  algorithms should cover most devices that have these sorts of resource constraints.”

To determine the strongest and most efficient lightweight algorithms, NIST held a development program that took several years, first communicating with industry and other organizations to understand their needs and then requesting potential solutions from the world’s cryptography community in 2018.

“We considered a number of criteria to be important,” McKay said. “The ability to provide security was paramount, but we also had to consider factors such as a candidate algorithm’s performance and flexibility in terms of speed, size and energy use. In the end we made a selection that was a good all-around choice.”

Ascon was developed in 2014 by a team of cryptographers from Graz University of Technology, Infineon Technologies, Lamarr Security Research and Radboud University. It was selected in 2019 as the primary choice for lightweight authenticated encryption in the final portfolio of the CAESAR competition, a sign that Ascon had withstood years of examination by cryptographers — a characteristic the NIST team also valued, McKay said.

There are currently seven members of the Ascon family, some or all of which may become part of NIST’s published lightweight cryptography standard. As a family, the variants give a range of functionality that will offer designers options for different tasks. Two of these tasks, McKay said, are among the most important in lightweight cryptography: authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) and hashing.

AEAD protects the confidentiality of a message, but it also allows extra information — such as the header of a message, or a device’s IP address — to be included without being encrypted. The algorithm ensures that all of the protected data is authentic and has not changed in transit. AEAD can be used in vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and it also can help prevent counterfeiting of messages exchanged with the radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that often help track packages in warehouses.

Hashing creates a short digital fingerprint of a message that allows a recipient to determine whether the message has changed. In lightweight cryptography, hashing might be used to check whether a software update is appropriate or has downloaded correctly.  ... '