A Fast and Compact RISC-V Accelerator for Ascon and Friends.

Ascon-\(p\) is the core building block of Ascon, the winner in the lightweight category of the CAESAR competition. With Isap, another Ascon-\(p\)-based AEAD scheme is currently competing in the 2nd round of the NIST lightweight cryptography standardization project. In contrast to Ascon, Isap focuses on providing hardening/protection against a large class of implementation attacks, such as DPA, DFA, SFA, and SIFA, entirely on mode-level. Consequently, Ascon-\(p\) can be used to realize a wide range of cryptographic computations such as authenticated encryption, hashing, pseudorandom number generation, with or without the need for implementation security, which makes it the perfect choice for lightweight cryptography on embedded devices.