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Quantum circuit implementations of lightweight authenticated encryption ASCON

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Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the quantum circuit implementations of the lightweight authenticated encryption algorithm ASCON by using the NOT gates, CNOT gates, Toffoli gates, measurements, and the dynamic quantum circuits. Firstly, the quantum circuit of addition of constants is realized by adding the NOT gates according to the position of 1 in round constants. Secondly, the quantum circuit of S-box of the permutation is synthesized according to the classical circuit diagram of S-box. Then the linear layer functions are expressed in matrix form, and their quantum circuits are synthesized according to Gaussian elimination. Finally, we synthesize the whole quantum circuits according to the general diagrams of the authenticated encryption algorithm ASCON. The correctness of the quantum circuits of the S-box and the linear layer was verified by the Aer simulator of the IBM Quantum platform. As far as we know, this is the first implementation of the quantum circuits for the Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) of ASCON in-place. The maximum quantum resources for the three ASCON authenticated encryption algorithms were estimated. The quantum circuit of ASCON-128 uses a total of 320 qubits, 30,639 NOT gates, 128,814 CNOT gates, 8064 Toffoli gates, 10,752 measurements, and 5376 dynamic quantum circuits. The quantum circuit of ASCON-128a uses a total of 320 qubits, 23,558 NOT gates, 98,144 CNOT gates, 6144 Toffoli gates, 8192 measurements, and 4096 dynamic quantum circuits. The quantum circuit of ASCON-80pq uses a total of 320 qubits, 30,736 NOT gates, 128,814 CNOT gates, 8064 Toffoli gates, 10,752 measurements, and 5376 dynamic quantum circuits.

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Algorithm 1
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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and the corresponding open-source project.

Notes

  1. https://docs.quantum.ibm.com/api/qiskit/qiskit.circuit.QuantumCircuit#depth.

  2. https://github.com/YUAN-M/ASCON-Linear.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor and the referees for carefully reading the paper, and for their useful comments which helped improve the paper.

Funding

This work is supported by the Natural Sciences Foundation of Hubei Province (Grant No. 2020CFB326), the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (Grant No. 62262020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics and Statistics, Hubei Minzu University, Enshi, 445000, Hubei, China

    Yuanmeng Zheng

  2. College of Intelligent Systems Science and Engineering, Hubei Minzu University, Enshi, 445000, Hubei, China

    Qingbin Luo, Qiang Li & Yi Lv

  3. School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, Sichuan, China

    Qingbin Luo

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  1. Yuanmeng Zheng
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Contributions

The original idea to this paper came from QL and YZ. All authors contributed to the preparation of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Qingbin Luo.

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Appendices

Appendix A: Algorithm 1

figure b

Appendix B: ASCON-128 authenticated encryption algorithm

figure c

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Zheng, Y., Luo, Q., Li, Q. et al. Quantum circuit implementations of lightweight authenticated encryption ASCON. J Supercomput (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-023-05877-x

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