Will Joan Daemon Win The NIST Standard For a Third Time? Meet Xoodyak — The Light-Weight Cipher
In 2022, NIST defined the winner of the PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography) competition. These were Kyber for Key Exchange/Public Key Encryption, and Crystals for Digital Signatures. 2023 will bring the winner of the light-weight cryptography competition that has been running since 2018. Currently, there are 10 finalists: ASCON, Elephant, GIFT-COFB, Grain128-AEAD, ISAP, Photon-Beetle, Romulus, Sparkle, TinyJambu, and Xoodyak.
Xoodyak comes from the Keccak research team, and which was successful in the SHA-3 competition. Overall, Keccak was evaluated as the most efficient and secure hashing method.
John Daemon also co-authored the Rijndael cipher that eventually became AES. With Xoodoo permutation we can apply it with the Xoodyak function. With this, we store a 384-bit state for the encryption and which relates to the sequence of the input data. With this, we can create a fixed-length hash, a pseudo-random bit value, or an output of a variable length. This can thus produce either a hash function, a random bit stream, or an encryption method.
