Energy Drain and Hardware Requirements: Which Is The Best Lightweight Cryptography Method from the…

And, so, NIST are getting close to announcing the winner of the NIST finalists for LWC (Light Weight Cryptography). These are: ASCON…
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Energy Drain and Hardware Requirements: Which Is The Best Lightweight Cryptography Method from the NIST Finalists?

And, so, NIST are getting close to announcing the winner of the NIST finalists for LWC (Light Weight Cryptography). These are: ASCON, Elephant, GIFT-COFB, Grain128-AEAD, ISAP, Photon-Beetle, Romulus, Sparkle, TinyJambu, and Xoodyak. These focus on AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Additional Data) and hashing. The methods which use a sponge method — as used with Keccak/SHA-3 — are Ascon, Elephant, ISAP, PHOTON-Beetle, SPARKLE, TinyJambu and Xoodyak. GIFT-COFB and Romulus are more traditional block ciphers, and Grain-128 is a stream cipher:

The key evaluators for the best method include their overall security; the their general performance (as measured with the number of cycles taken to conduct an operation); the gate count; the chip size; and energy consumption. When it comes to energy consumption and hardware requirements, Elsadek et al [1] performed a review of the 10 contenders:

In terms of the size of each implementation, we see that TinyJambu and Grain128 have the smallest footprint, while Sparkle has by far the largest footprint. In terms of gate equivalent (GE), TinyJambu requires 3,600 GEs, while Sparkle needs 39,500:

The energy efficiency is then defined as:

Energy efficiency (bit/J) = Throughput (bits/sec)/Power (J/sec)

and where we measure the bits per Joule. Figure 2 outlines the average energy efficiency, and where TinyJambu, Xoodyak and ASCON do well for energy, while ISAP, Elephant and Grain128-AEAD were poorest.

Figure 2: Average energy efficiency [1]

Conclusions

While Sparkle, Xoodyak ASCON and TinyJambu has been proven to be the fastest of the methods, we can see that Sparkle struggles a bit with its footprint, and in its energy efficency, and it’s Xoodyak ASCON and TinyJambu that seem to be strong in most areas. In my next article, I will produce a score card, and annouce a winner. In these tests, it is TinyJambu that wins in terms of footprint, gate count and energy efficiency.

References

[1] Elsadek, I., Aftabjahani, S., Gardner, D., MacLean, E., Wallrabenstein, J. R., & Tawfik, E. Y. (2022, May). Hardware and Energy Efficiency Evaluation of NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Finalists. In 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) (pp. 133–137). IEEE.