Re:Lightweight Cryptography
by marcosdumay on Sunday November 07, 2021 @11:21AM
(#29140740)
The processing needs of a wifi connection (or any wireless protocol) are overwhelming on dealing with the problems of a radio connection. Unless you are connecting, sending a single package and disconnecting¹, encryption barely registers.
For wired devices things changes a bit. Encryption can be dozens of times more expensive than moving your data around for processing. But if that's a problem, you need to accelerate your encryption in hardware², not to weaken the encryption.
1 - If you are, you are better with some protocol that keeps the encryption setup around between transmissions, not with weaker crypto.
2 - Just like you accelerate the "moving data around" part, because it doesn't go from the network into the main memory for free either.
Maybe those machines that don't even spin up a fan with 400 npm dependencies, but billions of of low end embedded devices pumped out annually.
Call me a sceptic but I think the lightcrypto contest is actually something that will benefit society far more than the post-quantum simultaneously underway.