The Quest for Efficient ASCON Implementations: A Comprehensive Review of Implementation Strategies and Challenges

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly expanded the deployment of 1 resource-constrained devices, introducing new security and privacy challenges. To address these concerns, the 2 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded a multi-year effort by announcing ASCON 3 as the new lightweight cryptography standard in 2023. ASCON’s cipher suite includes both Authenticated 4 Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) and hashing functions, ensuring authenticity, confidentiality, and 5 broad applicability. Since its standardization, there has been a significant research effort focused on enhancing 6 ASCON’s performance under diverse application constraints as well as assessing its vulnerability to advanced 7 side-channel attacks. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of current ASCON hardware implementations 8 on FPGA and ASIC platforms, examining key design trade-offs. Additionally, the latest side-channel attacks 9 on ASCON are examined. These attacks exploit weaknesses in the hardware implementations rather than in 10 the algorithm itself. Being highly efficient, they can breach both unprotected and protected implementations. 11 This survey also reviews the proposed countermeasures against these powerful attacks and analyzes how their 12 associated overhead conflicts with the performance demands of real-world ASCON applications. The synthesis 13 of these findings offers clear guidelines for designers seeking to implement ASCON. At the same time, areas 14 requiring further investigation are identified. As ASCON sees ever more widespread deployment, this review 15 serves as a reference for understanding the current state of research and for guiding future developments toward 16 efficient and secure implementations.