Evaluation of NIST Lightweight Cryptography Algorithms for Industrial Internet of Things

Lightweight cryptography (LWC) has gained abundant attention lately, especially when discussing security in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications and other systems with constrained resources. IoT has raised various security issues, highlighting the necessity for protection mechanisms. Traditional cryptographic algorithms, such as AES, require significant memory and processing power. LWC, on the other hand, promises security solutions that can meet the needs of IIoT devices with constrained resources. This paper systematically investigates how well the selected algorithms from the NIST CAESAR competition (Ascon, TinyJambu, Schwaemm, Xoodyak, Elephant, Photon-Beetle, and Grain) perform in deeply embedded systems, such as ESP32 microcontrollers. The main contributions of this study include a comprehensive evaluation, including throughput, performance on various data sizes, an initialization time of LWC algorithms, memory usage, CPU utilization, and randomness analysis, along with the calculation of a target function based on critical metrics in IIoT environments. The findings were that ASCON outperformed TinyJambu regarding cryptographic statistical analysis and performance at the expense of highly required memory. When data sizes are less than 64 bytes, TinyJambu, similar to Ascon, offers outstanding throughput and efficiency in memory utilization compared to other LWCs. When comparing LWC results to AES, the throughput, latency, and other metrics of Ascon, TinyJambu, Schwweam, Gift, and Xoodyak were significantly higher. The outcomes of LWC showed encouraging performance, highlighting the lightweight cryptographic algorithm’s potential for use in upcoming IIoT applications.