An Open-Source Platform for Evaluation of Hardware Implementations of Lightweight Authenticated Ciphers

Lightweight implementations of cryptographic algorithms must be evaluated in terms of security, cost, and performance before their deployment in practical applications. The availability of open-source platforms for such evaluation saves researchers' time and increases reproducibility of results. In this work, we improve upon the previous version of the Flexible Opensource workBench fOr Side-channel analysis (FO-BOS) to introduce “FOBOS2,” and utilize it to perform such evaluation tasks for hardware implementations of authenticated ciphers, with special focus on candidates submitted to the NIST Lightweight Cryptography standardization process. We perform power measurements on Artix7 FPGA, and countermeasure evaluation of lightweight hardware implementations of selected NIST Lightweight Cryptography Round-2 candidates and the current NIST standard AES-GCM on the Spartan6 and Artix7 FPGAs. Our results show that Ascon consumes the least power at 50 MHz, and has the lowest change in dynamic power per increase in frequency, while GIFT-COFB consumes the least energy-per-bit. We also show that side-channel countermeasures applied to implementations of Ascon and AES-GCM are effective using leakage detection tests.