Review of the NIST Light-Weight Cryptography Finalists

Since 2016, NIST has been assessing light-weight encryption methods, and, in 2022, NIST published the final 10: ASCON, Elephant, GIFT-COFB, Grain128-AEAD, ISAP, Photon-Beetle, Romulus, Sparkle, TinyJambu, and Xoodyak. The time that the article was written, NIST announced ASCON as the chosen method that will be published as NIST's lightweight cryptography standard later in 2023. In this article we provide a comparison between these methods in terms of energy efficiency, time for encryption and time for hashing.