"The DRACO Stream Cipher" by Matthias Hamann

In symmetric-key cryptography, we typically distinguish two types of encryption schemes: block ciphers and stream ciphers. Block ciphers divide a plaintext into blocks of a fixed size (e.g., 64 or 128 bits) and encrypt one such block of data as a whole. Stream ciphers, on the other hand, consider the plaintext as a continuous stream […]…

#Misc, #LightweightCryptography, #RFID, #StreamCiphers

https://insinuator.net/2023/06/the-draco-stream-cipher/

Digging into the NIST LWC winner (Ascon), and it's really cool! Even in reduced-round scenarios it requires a large number of nonce reuses/misuses to recover state or forge an invalid tag, and doesn't necessarily even result in key recovery dif you do. Worlds better than AES-GCM... though that's not saying much.

#NIST #LWC #LightweightCryptography #cryptography #ascon