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:
