Paper 2026/1882

A Reproducible Security–Performance Benchmark Protocol for Lightweight AEAD on Resource-Constrained IoT Nodes

Abstract

—Internet-of-Things (IoT) nodes must protect sensed data while operating with limited processing capability, memory, and battery capacity. In August 2025, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized SP 800-232, which standardizes the Ascon family for constrained devices. This paper presents ASCON-Edge, a reproducible protocol for evaluating the security, performance, memory cost, and directly measured energy cost of standardized Ascon-AEAD128 on resource-constrained IoT nodes. The protocol compares Ascon-AEAD128 with AES 128-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305 using identical message sizes, associated data, timing boundaries, build conditions, and security tests. It defines a deterministic workload, a nonce uniqueness and replay policy, a hardware-freeze record, raw-data fields, statistical summaries, direct-energy rules, and functional acceptance criteria. It also separates AEAD guarantees from application-layer responsibilities for replay prevention and key handling. A targeted literature synthesis motivates a final-standard, workload-aware comparison protocol. This is a methodology and reproducibility paper: it reports deterministic packet-format overhead, but deliberately does not claim hardware benchmark measurements before a frozen platform and raw data are available.