Ascon

Lightweight Cryptography

Ascon is a family of lightweight cryptographic algorithms designed to be efficient and easy to implement, even with added countermeasures against side-channel attacks. Ascon has been selected as new standard for lightweight authenticated encryption and hashing in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition (2019–2023). Ascon has also been selected as the primary choice for lightweight authenticated encryption in the final portfolio of the CAESAR competition (2014–2019).

Ascon is specified in NIST SP 800-232 (initial public draft): "Ascon-based Lightweight Cryptography Standards for Constrained Devices: Authenticated Encryption, Hash, and Extendable Output Functions".

Features

Ascon is designed and maintained by a team of cryptographers working for Graz University of Technology, Infineon Technologies, Intel Labs, and Radboud University:

Christoph Dobraunig, Maria Eichlseder, Florian Mendel and Martin Schläffer.

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