278 research outputs found
A Comprehensive Survey on the Implementations, Attacks, and Countermeasures of the Current NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standard
This survey is the first work on the current standard for lightweight
cryptography, standardized in 2023. Lightweight cryptography plays a vital role
in securing resource-constrained embedded systems such as deeply-embedded
systems (implantable and wearable medical devices, smart fabrics, smart homes,
and the like), radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, sensor networks, and
privacy-constrained usage models. National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) initiated a standardization process for lightweight
cryptography and after a relatively-long multi-year effort, eventually, in Feb.
2023, the competition ended with ASCON as the winner. This lightweight
cryptographic standard will be used in deeply-embedded architectures to provide
security through confidentiality and integrity/authentication (the dual of the
legacy AES-GCM block cipher which is the NIST standard for symmetric key
cryptography). ASCON's lightweight design utilizes a 320-bit permutation which
is bit-sliced into five 64-bit register words, providing 128-bit level
security. This work summarizes the different implementations of ASCON on
field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and ASIC hardware platforms on the basis
of area, power, throughput, energy, and efficiency overheads. The presented
work also reviews various differential and side-channel analysis attacks (SCAs)
performed across variants of ASCON cipher suite in terms of algebraic,
cube/cube-like, forgery, fault injection, and power analysis attacks as well as
the countermeasures for these attacks. We also provide our insights and visions
throughout this survey to provide new future directions in different domains.
This survey is the first one in its kind and a step forward towards
scrutinizing the advantages and future directions of the NIST lightweight
cryptography standard introduced in 2023
Face-off between the CAESAR Lightweight Finalists: ACORN vs. Ascon
Authenticated ciphers potentially provide resource savings and security improvements over the joint use of secret-key ciphers and message authentication codes. The CAESAR competition has aimed to choose the most suitable authenticated ciphers for several categories of applications, including a lightweight use case, for which the primary criteria are performance in resource-constrained devices, and ease of protection against side channel attacks (SCA). In March 2018, two of the candidates from this category, ACORN and Ascon, were selected as CAESAR contest finalists. In this research, we compare two SCA-resistant FPGA implementations of ACORN and Ascon, where one set of implementations has area consumption nearly equivalent to the defacto standard AES-GCM, and the other set has throughput (TP) close to that of AES-GCM. The results show that protected implementations of ACORN and Ascon, with area consumption less than but close to AES-GCM, have 23.3 and 2.5 times, respectively, the TP of AES-GCM. Likewise, implementations of ACORN and Ascon with TP greater than but close to AES-GCM, consume 18 percent and 74 percent of the area, respectively, of AES-GCM
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