An Open Hardware Modem for the Modern Era

Readers of a certain age will no doubt remember the external modems that used to sit next to their computers, with the madly flashing LEDs and cacophony of familiar squeals announcing your impending connection to a realm of infinite possibilities. By comparison, connecting to the Internet these days is about …read more

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NIST Helps You With Cryptography

Getting cryptography right isn’t easy, and it’s a lot worse on constrained devices like microcontrollers. RAM is usually the bottleneck — you will smash your stack computing a SHA-2 hash on an AVR — but other resources like computing power and flash code storage space are also at a premium. Trimming down a standard algorithm to work within these constraints opens up the Pandora’s box of implementation-specific flaws.

NIST stepped up to the plate, starting a lightweight cryptography project in 2013 which has now come out with a first report, and here it is as a PDF. The project is …read more

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