Which Will Become The Light-weight Encryption Standard? Will it be Sparkling or be an Elephant?
Standardization takes time, and often this is for a good reason. For this, you can have a competition for the best technology, and then for a whole community to review the methods presented. Then you have a balanced scorecard which assessess the key features of each of the methods. For NIST, this has been the way that they have defined the standards in cryptography, and to focus down on one or two core methods.
AES became a standard
In symmetric key, for example, NIST focused the industry in identifying just one method, and for all the other symmetric key methods (such as 3DES, RC4, and so on) to eventually be replaced by the new standard: AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). This standard came from the Rijndael method, and has since become the de facto standard for symmetric key encryption. But, being a standard doesn’t mean you always stay as the only method to use. In fact, just having one method is not healthy, as a flaw in it could bring down the Internet. And, so, we often have alternatives. For AES, we now have ChaCha20, and which is more light-weight in its approach.
Keccak became a standard
With MD-5 and SHA-1 on the way out, and SHA-2 (SHA-256) being the main focus…
