ascon VS ascon-c

If you want a fun little project, try porting Ascon to your language of choice! Shouldn't take more than a couple hours. Here's mine (in Go): https://github.com/lukechampine/ascon

I suppose if Ascon is widely adopted, it'll be worth adding an optimized assembly implementation...

One nice thing about lightweight crypto is that it's easy to port. Implementing ASCON in Go was pretty fun and only took an hour or two: https://github.com/lukechampine/ascon/blob/master/ascon.go

(Obviously it wouldn't make a ton of sense to use Go if you're resource-constrained, but having a library is worthwhile for compatibility reasons regardless.)

Related - a week or so ago I was playing with ASCON[1], a sponge based cipher and hash function aimed at embedded systems. A passing thought was that it might be handy to use as a random number generator. When I read this post a couple days ago, out of curiosity I picked up the ASCON permutation and benchmarked it vs this one.

It was unfortunately a bit slower: ~27 ns per 64-bit value (6 round permutation) vs ~4 ns for the included ChaCha8. I suspect it could be optimized, and run at the higher output rate (8 rounds per 128-bit output). One nice thing is that it does have a smaller state of only 40 bytes.

But - for the performance, this ChaCha8 implementation is _awesome_!

[1] https://ascon.iaik.tugraz.at

Regarding encryption, Hoodik uses 2048-bit PKCS#1 keys for RSA and AEAD Ascon-128a for AES. It also works with a chunk-based method for file storage, ensuring that simultaneous uploads and downloads occur seamlessly.

https://ascon.iaik.tugraz.at/ This got standardized as the leightweight cryptographic standard.

https://github.com/ascon/ascon-c

I was hoping for a simple piece of C code that did the job under 30 lines ... as usual, it's a forest of implementations.