A Detailed Report on the Overhead of Hardware APIs for Lightweight Cryptography

Patrick Karl; Michael Tempelmeier

Paper 2020/112

A Detailed Report on the Overhead of Hardware APIs for Lightweight Cryptography

Patrick Karl and Michael Tempelmeier

Abstract

The "Competition for Authenticated Encryption: Security, Applicability, and Robustness" (CAESAR) was the first cryptographic competition that required designers to use a mandatory hardware API for their implementations. Recently, a similar hardware API for the NIST Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) project was proposed. Both APIs feature an accompanying development package to help designers implementing the API. In this paper, we have an in-depth look on these packages. We analyze the features of both packages, discuss their resource utilization, and demonstrate their impact on Ascon128, SpoC-64, and Gimli implementations on a modern Artix-7 FPGA. Finally, we provide some tweaks and enhancements to further optimize the development package for the LWC API.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: LWC CAESAR API FPGA Gimli Ascon SpoC lightweight cryptography AEAD Authenticated Encryption
Contact author(s): patrick karl @ tum de
michael tempelmeier @ tum de
History: 2021-02-02: revised; 2020-02-04: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2020/112
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/112,
      author = {Patrick Karl and Michael Tempelmeier},
      title = {A Detailed Report on the Overhead of Hardware {APIs} for Lightweight Cryptography},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/112},
      year = {2020},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/112}
}