Abstract:
In August 2019, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced
32 candidates for Round 2 of their Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) standardization
process. NIST needed to understand how each of the candidates performed in
software and hardware before making their finalist selections. George Mason University's
Cryptographic Engineering Research Group (CERG) assisted NIST by organizing the Field-
Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) benchmarking of the Round 2 candidates. CERG developed
LWC Hardware API compliant implementations for 14 of the Round 2 candidates.
This work contains a detailed breakdown of the unprotected hardware implementations of
Elephant and Xoodyak, along with figures and tables to illustrate the design choices that
were made. It also highlights several new features that CERG added to the LWC Hardware
API development package to assist in the FPGA benchmarking. An overview of CERG's
benchmarking efforts, along with the results for Elephant and Xoodyak, are contained. From
the results, analysis was conducted to determine possible design improvements. On March
29, 2021, NIST announced both Elephant and Xoodyak as LWC finalists. Before NIST
announced finalists, Domain Oriented Masking was used to develop side-channel resistant
implementations of both Elephant and Xoodyak. The efforts from this work certainly
provide NIST with valuable information for their LWC standardization process.
