[openssl-dev] Speck Cipher Integration with OpenSSL

[William Bathurst]

Hi Hanno/all,

I can understand your view that "more is not always good" in crypto. The 
reasoning behind the offering can be found in the following whitepaper:

https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/events/lightweight-cryptography-workshop-2015/documents/papers/session1-shors-paper.pdf

I will summarize in a different way though. We wish to offer an 
optimized lightweight TLS for IoT. A majority of devices found in IoT 
are resource constrained, for example a device CPU may only have 32K of 
RAM. Therefore security is an afterthought by developers. For some only 
AES 128 is available and they wish to use 256 bit encryption. Then Speck 
256 would be an option because it has better performance and provides 
sufficient security.

Based on the above scenario you can likely see why we are interested in 
OpenSSL. First, OpenSSL can be used for terminating lightweight TLS 
connections near the edge, and then forwarding using commonly used ciphers.

[IoT Device] -----TLS/Speck---->[IoT Gateway]-----TLS----> [Services]

Also, we are interested in using OpenSSL libraries at the edge for 
client creation. One thing we would like to do is provide instructions 
for an highly optimized build of OpenSSL that can be used for contrained 
devices.

I think demand will eventually grow because there is an initiative by 
the US government to improve IoT Security and Speck is being developed 
and proposed as a standard within the government. Therefore, I see users 
who wish to play in this space would be interested in a version where 
Speck could be used in OpenSSL.

It is my hope to accomplish the following:

[1] Make Speck available via Open Source, this could be as an option or 
as a patch in OpenSSL.
[2] If we make it available as a patch, is there a place where we would 
announce/make it known that it is available?

We are also looking at open-sourcing the client side code. This would be 
used to create light-weight clients that use Speck and currently we also 
build basic OAuth capability on top of it.

Thanks for your input!

Bill

On 1/5/2018 11:40 AM, Hanno Böck wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Jan 2018 10:52:01 -0800
> William Bathurst <wbathurs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 1) Community interest in such a lightweight cipher.
> I think there's a shifting view that "more is not always good" in
> crypto. OpenSSL has added features in the past "just because" and it
> was often a bad decision.
>
> Therefore I'd generally oppose adding ciphers without a clear usecase,
> as increased code complexity has a cost.
> So I think questions that should be answered:
> What's the usecase for speck in OpenSSL? Are there plans to use it in
> TLS? If yes why? By whom? What advantages does it have over existing
> ciphers? (Yeah, it's "lightweight", but that's a pretty vague thing.)
>
>
> Also just for completeness, as some may not be aware: There are some
> concerns about Speck due to its origin (aka the NSA). I don't think
> that is a reason to dismiss a cipher right away, what I'd find more
> concerning is that from what I observed there hasn't been a lot of
> research about speck.
>