Abstract
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is currently undertaking a process to evaluate and eventually standardize one or more “lightweight” algorithms for authenticated encryption and hashing that are suitable for resource-restricted devices. In addition to security, this process takes into account the efficiency of the candidate algorithms in various hardware environments (e.g. FPGAs, ASICs) and software platforms (e.g. 8, 16, 32-bit microcontrollers). However, while there exist numerous detailed benchmarking results for 8-bit AVR and 32-bit ARM/RISC-V/ESP32 microcontrollers, relatively little is known about the candidates’ efficiency on 16-bit platforms. In order to fill this gap, we present a performance evaluation of the final-round candidates Ascon, Schwaemm, TinyJambu, and Xoodyak on the MSP430 series of ultra-low-power 16-bit microcontrollers from Texas Instruments. All four algorithms were explicitly designed to achieve high performance in software and have further in common that the underlying primitive is a permutation. We discuss how these permutations can be implemented efficiently in Assembly language and analyze how basic design decisions impact their execution time on the MSP430 architecture. Our results show that, overall, Schwaemm is the fastest algorithm across various lengths of data and associated data, respectively. Xoodyak has benefits when a large amount of associated data is to be authenticated, whereas TinyJambu is very efficient for the authentication of short messages.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time of writing this paper, the third (i.e. final) round of evaluation was still going on and NIST had not yet released the round-3 benchmarking results.
- 2.
Out of the total of 16 general-purpose registers, only 12 can actually be used by the programmer, which means the usable register space of MSP430 microcontrollers is even smaller than that of the 8-bit AVR architecture (192 vs. 256 bits).
- 3.
As argued in [4], the ability to work locally (i.e. on a part of the state at a time) is an important design criterion to achieve good efficiency on microcontrollers whose register space is too small to store the full state (high locality reduces the need to move state-words between registers and RAM). However, efficiency desiderata like locality have to be carefully balanced with security desiderata like diffusion.
- 4.
http://www.iar.com/products/architectures/iar-embedded-workbench-for-msp430 (accessed on 2022-12-14).
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Acknowledgements
The last author was supported by the Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR) Luxembourg under CORE grant C19/IS/13641232. The source code is available online at http://github.com/johgrolux/aead430.
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Alsahli, M., Borgognoni, A., Cardoso dos Santos, L., Cheng, H., Franck, C., Großschädl, J. (2023). Lightweight Permutation-Based Cryptography for the Ultra-Low-Power Internet of Things. In: Bella, G., Doinea, M., Janicke, H. (eds) Innovative Security Solutions for Information Technology and Communications. SecITC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13809. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32636-3_2
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