Published in SenSys 2026 — the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Embedded Artificial Intelligence and Sensing Systems
Abstract
In response to the security challenges inherent in the Internet of Things (IoT), in 2023, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has endorsed ASCON, a cipher suite designed to secure the communications between resource-constrained IoT devices. Thread, a popular wireless mesh protocol designed for smart homes and smart buildings, does not currently support ASCON. We modified OpenThread, the open source implementation of Thread, to support ASCON. Compared to the original version of OpenThread, we show that the energy consumption of battery powered smart home devices are not negatively impacted when OpenThread is secured by ASCON encryption. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the potential of ASCON in securing the communications of smart home devices operating under OpenThread.