Optimized Software Implementations of Ascon, Grain-128AEAD, and TinyJambu on ARM Cortex-M0

Implementations of lightweight cryptographic algorithms are needed in resource-constrained environments. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is evaluating the standardization of lightweight authenticated encryption with associated data and has selected ten finalists. This study conducts software evaluations of the finalists on ARM Cortex-M0, focusing on three performance metrics; latency, throughput, and memory usage. We also discuss the impact of input data length and parameters on implementation performance of the ten candidates. Based on the evaluation results of the reference code, we focus on three cryptographic algorithms, Ascon, Grain-128AEAD, and TinyJambu, and optimize the software codes. Our measurement results reveal that the finalists consume less memory than AES Galois counter mode.