Kyber-KEM-Ascon: Benchmarking a Lightweight Post-quantum KEM on IoT Devices

CRYSTALS-Kyber, officially standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in August 2024 as ML-KEM FIPS, is the only post quantum secure key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) standard. Due to its inherent computationally intensive nature, mapping it on lightweight IoT devices is often a struggle. This study examines the replacement of the Keccak hashing function in Kyber-KEM with the NIST LWC competition winner called Ascon hash function. We compare speed/ memory improvement by executing Kyber-KEM-Ascon on an ARM Cortex M4 device and present novel benchmarking results; Kyber-KEM-Ascon shows about 25% reduction in clock cycles, along with lower memory usage requirements (about 8%). These results suggest that Kyber-KEM-Ascon is more suited for lightweight platforms, offering benefits for IoT security applications.