The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has declared that a family of authenticated encryption and hashing algorithms known as Ascon will be standardized for lightweight cryptography applications. This is to ensure the security of data created and transmitted by the Internet of Things, such as tiny sensors and actuators, medical devices, stress detectors, and keyless entry fobs. The idea is to provide security to devices that have limited electronic resources. Ascon was developed by a team of cryptographers from Graz University of Technology, Infineon Technologies, Lamarr Security Research, and Radboud University. It includes ASCON-128, ASCON-128a, and ASCON-80pq, which is resistant to quantum key-search, as well as ASCON-HASH, ASCON-HASHA, ASCON-XOF, and ASCON-XOFA. It is easy to implement, even with countermeasures against side-channel attacks, and provides authenticated encryption with associated data, which binds ciphertext to additional information, such as a device's IP address. This ensures that all of the protected data is authentic and has not changed in transit. It can be used in vehicle-to-vehicle communications and to prevent counterfeiting of messages exchanged with radio frequency identification tags. Implementations of the algorithm are available in various programming languages and hardware implementations that offer side-channel protections and energy efficiency.
This Cyber News was published on thehackernews.com. Publication date: Thu, 09 Feb 2023 10:23:02 +0000