After AES, NIST is Defining the Next Great Standard for Encryption … Light-weight Crypto
5 min readApr 24, 2021
NIST has created a number of competitions around the standardization of cryptography. This included select Rindael for the AES standard and Keccak for the SHA-3 method. Currently, they have reached the final stage for two important standards: post-quantum cryptography; and light-weight cryptography. The finalists for light-weight cryptography are [here]:
- ASCON. ASCON implements a hashing method for a 256-bit hash, and uses a 320-bit permutation. It was created by Christoph Dobraunig Maria Eichlseder Florian Mendel and Martin Schläffer [link]. ASCON can also be used to create authenticated encryption [link].
- Elephant. In Cybersecurity, Where Would You Find Dumbo, Jumbo and a Pink Elephant?[link].
- GIFT-COFB. GIFT: A Small Present for Cybersecurity and IoT: here.
- Grain128-AEAD. Grain is a Light Weight Stream Cipher and was written by Martin Hell, Thomas Johansson and Willi Meier. It has a relatively low gate count, power consumption and memory. It has an 80-bit key, and has two shift registers and a nonlinear output function [paper][link].
- ISAP. Isap is a light weight block cipher and was written by Christoph Dobraunig, Maria Eichlseder, Stefan Mangard, Florian Mendel, Bart Mennink, Robert Primas…