CRC Seminar Series - Dr Guang Gong

Title:

Lightweight Ciphers - ACE, SpoC, Spix, and WAGE and their performance attestation in IoT access authentication

Abstract:

A standard cryptography aimed for securing Internet communication may be not suitable for most of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. NIST called the lightweight crypto standardization competition for securing low-end IoT devices, which was initialized in 2017 and the round 3 candidates was announced by the end of March this year. In this talk, I will introduce our four submissions, ACE, SpoC, Spix, and WAGE, which were advanced to the round 2 candidates. The first three used the Simeck round functions in a sponger structure, WAGE is the authenticated WG encryption, which is based the WG (Welch-Gong) stream cipher, and all four can be configured in different modes for providing pseudorandom sequence generators, encryption, authenticated encryption and hash functions. Those ciphers are still interested in some applications of IoT systems for different requirements, such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, and Zigbee sensors in automated cars, and so on. Then I will direct our attention to look at current access authentication protocols for IoT systems, and show the performance of those ciphers when they are implemented in the WiFi and CoAP handshake protocols under the IEEE802.11a physical layer communication protocol (OFDM) in software defined radio. Finally, I will also provide some observations on NIST Round 3 candidates.

Bio:

Dr Gong is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Waterloo, a University Research Chair, and an IEEE Fellow. Her research interests are in the areas of pseudorandom generation, cryptography, and communication security. Her current research interests include pseudorandom generation, lightweight cryptography (LWC), the IoT security, blockchain privacy, and privacy preserving machine learning.  Dr. Gong has received several awards, including the Premier’s Research Excellence Award Ontario, Canada, in 2001, the Ontario Research Fund - Research Excellence Award, Canada, in 2010, and the University Research Chair in 2018. She serves/served as an Associate Editor for several journals, including the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY from 2005 to 2008, from 2017 to 2018, and since 2020 and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON DEPENDABLE AND SECURE COMPUTING since November 2021, the journal of Cryptography and Communications since 2007. She has served on numerous technical program committees and conferences as the co-chair/organizer or committee member.