Quick Analysis of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process Finalists
Fernando Georgel Bîrleanu, Nicu Bizon · 2022 14th International Conference on Electronics, Computers and Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) · 2022
Following the final steps in the process of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) lightweight cryptography standardization, extremely helpful in constrained systems such as the continuously growing Internet of Things (IoT) with the 5G communications as a major actor, this paper aims to draw and summarize some key features and particularities of the final ten algorithms that remained in the competition of this standardization process. The ten final algorithms are analyzed in terms of parameters used, providing AEAD-only functionality or AEAD and hashing functionality and software and hardware performance. While software performance compares code size for the smallest implementations and timings for the fastest implementations on different microcontrollers versus NIST references (AES-GCM/SHA-256), hardware performance compares resources utilization, maximum frequency achieved and throughput versus NIST references (variants of AES-GCM and SHA family).