NIST LWC Software Performance Benchmarks on Microcontrollers
Purpose of this Website
On this website, we provide benchmarking figures for Software implementations of
NIST LWC ciphers. We evaluate the speed, ROM and RAM utilization of the implementations on 5 different microcontrollers and 4 architectures. This benchmarking initiative was developed shortly after the beginning of the NIST LWC selection process. We tested 300+ implementation variants of the NIST candidates over the course of 4 years. You can find more details regarding the framework, its source code, the tested implementations and a link to the obtained results in the resources section.
Current State of Work
In February 2023, NIST announced ASCON as the winning cipher of the NIST LWC competition. Hence, the selection process within the NIST LWC project has come to an end. Our obtained benchmarking data will remain online for now, in order to provide a reference to our LWC perfomance comparisions. We will however not update the results regulary, anymore. In case you are interested in the performance of a specific (new) implementation of a LWC cipher, please write a mail to lwc[at]las3.de. We will then check if and how we can still provide the desired data.
Resources
Team