Generic Security of the Ascon Mode: On the Power of Key Blinding

ePrint Report: Generic Security of the Ascon Mode: On the Power of Key Blinding

Bart Mennink, Charlotte Lefevre

The Ascon authenticated encryption scheme has recently been selected as winner of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition. Despite its fame, however, there is no known generic security analysis of its mode: most importantly, all related generic security results only use the key to initialize the state and do not take into account key blinding internally and at the end. In this work …

analysis ascon competition cryptography encryption eprint report fame key mode nist power report security security analysis winner