Duel of the Cybersecurity Titans for Lightweight Crypto: Meet Romulus

The NIST competition for lightweight cryptography has reached the final stage, and with a shortlist of 10 candidates. Each differs in their approach, but they aim to create a cryptography method that is secure, has a low footprint, and is robust against attacks.

So while many of the contenders, such as ASCON, GIFT and Isap, use the sponge method derived from the SHA-3 standard (Keccak), Romulus takes a more traditional approach and looks towards a more traditional light-weight crypto approach. Overall it is defined as a tweakable block cipher (TBC) and which supports authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD). For its more traditional approach, it uses the Skinny lightweight tweakable block cipher and the details were published here [here]:

SKINNY

SKINNY is a lightweight block cipher. It a 64-bit or 128-bit block size, and a key size of 64 bits, 128 bits and 256 bits. The methods are SKINNY-64–64 (64-bit block, 64-bit key and 32 rounds); SKINNY-64–128 (64-bit block, 128-bit key, and 36 rounds); SKINNY-64–192 (64-bit block, 192-bit key, and 40 rounds); SKINNY-128–128 (128-bit block, 128-bit key…