HomeWinBuzzer NewsGoogle announces Adiantum, a new form of encyrption for low-end devices

Google announces Adiantum, a new form of encyrption for low-end devices

Adiantum has five-fold speed increases over AES on low-end devices. It's designed for storage encryption in developing countries and on wearables.

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has announced a new form of in celebration of Safer Internet Day. Dubbed Adiantum, it's designed to improve security on low-end devices without specialized hardware.

Though most mid to high-end support AES encryption, some lower end don't. In developing countries, that could prove a major issue, with processors like the ARM Cortex-A7 lacking support.

Thankfully, HTTPS encryption does all of the heavy in the browser. However, there are plenty of reasons to encrypt your local storage, and it's this niche Adiantum addresses.

5x Performance Increase

“Adiantum allows us to use the ChaCha stream cipher in a length-preserving mode, by adapting ideas from AES-based proposals for length-preserving encryption such as HCTR and HCH,” explained Google's Paul Crowley and Eric Biggers in a blog post. “On ARM Cortex-A7, Adiantum encryption and decryption on 4096-byte sectors is about 10.6 cycles per byte, around 5x faster than AES-256-XTS.”

The new form of encryption is specially designed for these low-end devices, which could include things like smartwatches and other wearables. These performance increases are extremely notable, and Google says it has ‘very high confidence' in Adiantum's security.

Crowley and Biggers also explained the inspiration behind the strange name. It's a reference to the genus of the maidenhair fern, which ‘represents security and discretion'. You can read the full paper on Adiantum here.

SourceGoogle
Ryan Maskell
Ryan Maskellhttps://ryanmaskell.co.uk
Ryan has had a passion for gaming and technology since early childhood. Fusing the skills from his Creative Writing and Publishing degree with profound technical knowledge, he enjoys covering news about Microsoft. As an avid writer, he is also working on his debut novel.

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