Hardware and Energy Efficiency Evaluation of NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Finalists
Islam Elsadek, Sohrab Aftabjahani, Doug Gardner, Erik MacLean, John Ross Wallrabenstein, Eslam Yahya Tawfik
Abstract
Current cryptographic algorithms are designed for server environments prioritizing security with no limitations on hardware resources. They may not be suitable for emerging resource-constrained devices used in areas such as Edge computing, UAV, and IoT. For such constrained devices, many LWC algorithms have been proposed, however, there is no FIPS standard yet. So, NIST initiated a standardization process for a LWC FIPS standard. Finalists are announced with 10 algorithms after two rounds of evaluation. The aim of this work is to design and evaluate the hardware of these candidates using ASIC synthesis over GF 22nm CMOS technology. The evaluation focuses on energy efficiency using bit/joule as the main metric. Other metrics such as throughput and area are evaluated as well. Results show a great discrepancy in the energy efficiency between the finalists. For example, TinyJambu, Xoodyak and ASCON achieved 10-25 times better energy efficiency compared to ISAP, Elephant, and Grain-128AEAD while processing the same number of bits.