The Debate Over How to Encrypt the Internet of Things – WIRED

Internet-connected gadgets like lightbulbs and fitness trackers are notorious for poor security. That's partly because theyre often made cheaply and with haste, which leads to careless mistakes and outsourcing of problematic parts. But its also partly due to the lack of computing power in the first place; it's not so easy to encrypt all that data with limited resources. Or at least thats how the conventional wisdom goes.

But real-world data suggests that many of those ubiquitous tiny gadgets can run versions of traditional, time-tested encryption schemes. A team from the Swiss IoT encryption firm Teserakt argues that there's no need to reinvent the wheel when the real solution is simply holding IoT manufacturers to higher standards. They made their case at a National Institute of Standards and Technology conference in Maryland this month focused on developing lightweight cryptography for embedded devices.

But traditional cryptography, particularly the stalwart Advanced Encryption Standard, often works just fine in IoT devices, says Antony Vennard, Teserakt's chief engineer. The researchers have even observed a number of situations where security-conscious manufactures found ways to incorporate it, like in the embedded systems of cars. And other, independent studies have had similar findings.

"The lightweight competition is based on the idea that for embedded devicesthings like industrial controllers and smart cards like chip credit cardsAES is too heavy, too big. Using it takes up too much space and power," Vennard says. "But my passport has a chip in it that can run AES. Modern smart cards can run it. Fitness trackers like FitBits can run it. In our experience, AES is pretty much everywhere, even in embedded devices."

"Where it could get confusing is where people arent sure what level of security they need."

Antony Vennard, Teserakt

Its important to talk about the actual utility of lightweight encryption now, because it takes years for the cryptography community to develop and vet a new encryption scheme to ensure that its safe to use. NIST has already been working on lightweight cryptography since 2015. And once those standards are in place, it takes even more time to gain real-world experience implementing the scheme to catch mistakes. It adds a lot of time and potential risk to the process of securing these devices. If you can make existing encryption algorithms work on them instead, all the better.

In February, for example, Google debuted a method for encrypting most low-end Android devices regardless of how piddly their processors. Rather than a novel encryption scheme, it relied on clever implementations of AES and other existing cryptographic methods to reduce the chance of introducing a fundamental flaw. The method, dubbed Adiantum, is an impressive solution to one of Android's more daunting problems. But Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green points out that the lengths Google had to go to to achieve it may actually indicate a need for lightweight cryptography, rather than showing that it's worth sticking with AES. "It's not actually a great argument for 'AES is fast enough,'" Green says.

Though it may be possible to implement traditional encryption more widely than the IoT industry currently believes, Vennard admits that there are situations where lightweight encryption would be useful. Certain devices, particularly things like simple sensors in industrial control settings, are powered by microcontrollers so rudimentary that they really would require special encryption techniques to secure. But Vennard argues that the key is clearly defining these categories rather than creating a situation where developers and manufacturers don't know which cryptographic techniques should be used where.

"There are some cases where you might need lightweight crypto, but where it could get confusing is where people arent sure what level of security they need," Vennard says. "If people can use AESwe have about 20 years of experience implementing AESbut don't, that's a risk, because implementing something new is tricky."

It's also always possible that the US government knows something private researchers don't. Along with NIST, the National Security Agency, for example, has stressed the importance of developing next-generation cryptography schemes. That's partly because of the threat to encryption posed by the rise of quantum computing, but it's also because of the IoT security crisis.

Read the original post:
The Debate Over How to Encrypt the Internet of Things - WIRED