RISC-V Instruction Set Extensions for Lightweight Symmetric Cryptography

The NIST LightWeight Cryptography (LWC) selection process aims to standardise cryptographic functionality which is suitable for resource-constrained devices. Since the outcome likely have significant, long-lived impact, careful evaluation of each submission with respect metrics explicitly outlined in call imperative. Beyond robustness submissions against cryptanalytic attack, related their implementation (e.g., execution latency and memory footprint) form an important example. Aiming provide evidence allowing richer such metrics, this paper presents design, implementation, one separate Instruction Set Extension (ISE) 10 LWC final round submissions, namely Ascon, Elephant, GIFT-COFB, Grain-128AEADv2, ISAP, PHOTON-Beetle, Romulus, Sparkle, TinyJAMBU, Xoodyak; although we base work on use RISC-V, argue that it provides more general insight.