KLEIN — The Light-weight crypto method that hides its operation
The AES block cipher method is well used in operations, but it gives away its secrets within side-channel attacks. With this, an intruder can listen to the electrical noise, or the radio emissions and derive the AES key. So something that should take trillions and trillions of years to find a key, can be computed in less than 30 minutes. Here is Dr Owen Lo cracking an AES key live:
Another problem with AES, is that it requires a fair amount of memory, battery consumption and CPU utilization, so is not fit for limited processor devices (such as sensors). For this, we turn to lightweight cryptography method. In this, we move from a 128-bit (16 bytes) block size, to a smaller one, such as for a 64-bit (8 bytes).
KLEIN is used to create block-cipher-based hash functions and message authentication codes (MACs), and is well-suited to resource-constrained devices [paper]:
