Security News > 2023 > February > Uncle Sam wants to strip the IoS out of IoT with light crypto

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology wants to protect all devices great and small, and is getting closer to settling on next-gen cryptographic algorithms suitable for systems at both ends of that spectrum - the very great and the very small.

The lightweight cryptography algorithms for IoT need to be powerful enough to offer high security and efficient enough to do so with limited electronic resources.

After years of testing and winnowing down dozens of contenders, NIST announced on Tuesday it has tapped Ascon - a package of seven algorithms for authenticated encryption and related operations - as the choice to safeguard data collected by IoT devices.

"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," NIST computer scientist Kerry McKay said in a statement.

The big end of computing: HPC. The announcement came a day after NIST started taking public comment on a draft publication outlining the architecture and security needs for zone-based high-performance computing systems.

As with IoT devices but at the opposite end of the scale, the size of HPC systems makes them challenging to secure, according to NIST. Among the obstacles faced it cited "Their size; performance requirements; diverse and complex hardware, software, and applications; varying security requirements; the nature of shared resources; and the continuing evolution of HPC systems."

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/02/09/nist_iot_hpc_algorithms/