I am currently doing my masters research on security of wireless sensor networks, the topic is "ENHANCING THE SECURITY OF WIRLESS SENSOR NETWORKS BY COMBINING GEOENCRYPTION AND LIGHT WEIGHT CRYPTOGRAPHIC HASH FUNCTION (LOCHA)" The encryption process will use MiniAES which IS same as normal AES with all component reduced while maintaining the same structure and security of normal AES. So, i am finding a justification on MiniAES computational time and space complexity when use to show the gab the research will bridge in terms of space and time complexity compared with other existing encryption algorithms to work with limitations of sensors. Though MiniAES is not that popular i do not know if some have an idea or come across such thing. Thanking you in anticipation for your answers.
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5$\begingroup$ Geoencryption (limiting decryption to a single location) requires a secure execution environment, and a secured way to determine location, which is complex. Power saving obtainable by lightweight hash or encryption is going to be negligible in comparison. Also: "Mini-AES is for educational purposes only. It is a small-scale version of the AES designed to help beginners understand the basic structure of AES". What's the logic behind choosing that for a masters? It will increase the citation count of other papers on lightweight cryptography and geoencryption, but can it be actually put to use? $\endgroup$– fgrieu ♦Commented Dec 8, 2020 at 7:10
1 Answer
The encryption process will use MiniAES which IS same as normal AES with all component reduced while maintaining the same structure and security of normal AES.
MiniAES most certainly does not have the same security as normal AES. To quote the original paper:
It is meant to be a purely educational cipher and is not considered secure for
actual applications.
Indeed, it has essentially zero security:
It has a 16 bit key. It is trivial for an attacker to try all 65536 keys to search for the correct one.
It has a 16 bit block size; that means you'd hit he birthday bound after 512 encrypted bytes.
It doesn't reach full change propagation; an output nybble is a function of the key and two of the input nybbles (the other two input nybbles being irrelevent). Hence, it can be characterized as two 8 bit block ciphers interleaved (hence you hit the birthday bound after encrypting only 32 bytes...)
It's sole reason for existence is to serve as target practice for budding cryptographers.
