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The Final Round: Benchmarking NIST LWC Ciphers on Microcontrollers

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Attacks and Defenses for the Internet-of-Things (ADIoT 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13745))

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Abstract

In this work, we present our benchmarking results for the ten finalist ciphers of the Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) project initiated by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). We evaluate the speed and code size of various software implementations on five different platforms featuring four different architectures. Moreover, we benchmark the dynamic memory utilization of the remaining NIST LWC algorithms on one 32-bit ARM controller. We describe our test cases and methodology and provide some information regarding the design and properties of the finalists before showing and discussing our results. Altogether, we evaluated almost 300 implementations of the 3rd round candidates and pick the most appropriate and best (primary) implementation of each cipher for our comparisons. We include a variant of AES-GCM in our benchmarking in order to be able to compare the state-of-the-art to the novel LWC ciphers. Our research gives an overview over the performance of the latest software implementations of the NIST LWC finalists and shows under which circumstances which candidate is performing the best in our individual test cases. Additionally, we make all benchmarking results, the code for our test framework and every tested implementation available to the public to ensure a transparent testing process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://lab.las3.de/gitlab/lwc/compare.

  2. 2.

    https://lab.las3.de/gitlab/lwc/candidates.

  3. 3.

    https://lwc.las3.de.

  4. 4.

    https://lwc.las3.de.

  5. 5.

    https://tls.mbed.org/.

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Acknowledgements

This project is funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt). Furthermore, this research is supported by the BayWISS Consortium Digitization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. OTH Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Sebastian Renner, Enrico Pozzobon & Jürgen Mottok

  2. Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Sebastian Renner

  3. University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Enrico Pozzobon

Authors
  1. Sebastian Renner
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  2. Enrico Pozzobon
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  3. Jürgen Mottok
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sebastian Renner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Wenjuan Li

  2. University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Steven Furnell

  3. Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Weizhi Meng

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Renner, S., Pozzobon, E., Mottok, J. (2022). The Final Round: Benchmarking NIST LWC Ciphers on Microcontrollers. In: Li, W., Furnell, S., Meng, W. (eds) Attacks and Defenses for the Internet-of-Things. ADIoT 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13745. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21311-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21311-3_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-21311-3

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