Power-Saving Chip to Revolutionize IoT Network

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The IoT network is capable of connecting many different sensors integrated in civil structures, appliances, vehicles, manufacturing equipment, etc. to online servers. However, one of the acute problems faced by the developers of IoT devices is the high power consumption required for computing. Complicated public-key encryption protocols in computer networks are executed by software, and the encryption protocols software execution require a high energy and memory space that may be difficult for the sensors to handle.

A new chip built by MIT researchers, compatible to function for public-key encryption, consumes only 1/400 as much power as software execution of the same protocols would. It also uses about 1/10 as much memory and executes 500 times faster. This special-purpose chip uses less power consumption of public-key encryption by 99.75 percent, reports coherentnews.com.

Utsav Banerjee, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the research paper said: “There is a lot of debate regarding which curve is secure and which curve to use, and there are multiple governments with different standards coming up that talk about different curves. With this chip, we can support all of them, and hopefully, when new curves come along in the future, we can support them as well.”