FELICS-AEAD: Benchmarking of Lightweight Authenticated Encryption Algorithms

Cryptographic algorithms that can simultaneously provide both encryption and authentication play an increasingly important role in modern security architectures and protocols (e.g. TLS v1.3). Dozens of authenticated encryption systems have been designed in the past five years, which has initiated a large body of research in cryptanalysis. The interest in authenticated encryption has further risen after the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced an initiative to standardize “lightweight” authenticated ciphers and hash functions that are suitable for resource-constrained devices. However, while there already exist some cryptanalytic results on these recent designs, little is known about their performance, especially when they are executed on small 8, 16, and 32-bit microcontrollers. In this paper, we introduce an open-source benchmarking tool suite for a fair and consistent evaluation of Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) algorithms written in C or assembly language for 8-bit AVR, 16-bit MSP430, and 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 platforms. The tool suite is an extension of the FELICS benchmarking framework and provides a new AEAD-specific low-level API that allows users to collect very fine-grained and detailed results for execution time, RAM consumption, and binary code size in a highly automated fashion. FELICS-AEAD comes with two pre-defined evaluation scenarios, which were developed to resemble security-critical operations commonly carried out by real IoT applications to ensure the benchmarks are meaningful in practice. We tested the AEAD tool suite using five authenticated encryption algorithms, namely AES-GCM and the CAESAR candidates ACORN, ASCON, Ketje-Jr, and NORX, and present some preliminary results.