Software Benchmarking of the 2nd round CAESAR Candidates

Abstract. The software performance of cryptographic schemes is an important factor in the decision to include such a scheme in real-world protocols like TLS, SSH or IPsec. In this paper, we develop a benchmarking framework to perform software performance measurements on authenticated encryption schemes. In particular, we apply our framework to independently benchmark the 29 remaining 2nd round candidates of the CAESAR competition. Many of these candidates have multiple parameter choices, or deploy software optimised versions raising our total number of benchmarked implementations to 232. We illustrate our results in various diagrams and hope that our contribution helps developers to find an appropriate cipher in their selection choice.