Status Report on the First Round of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is in the process of selecting one or more authenticated encryption and hashing schemes suitable for constrained environments through a public, competition-like process. In February 2019, 57 candidate algorithms were submitted to NIST for... See full abstract

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is in the process of selecting one or more authenticated encryption and hashing schemes suitable for constrained environments through a public, competition-like process. In February 2019, 57 candidate algorithms were submitted to NIST for consideration. Among these, 56 were accepted as first-round candidates in April 2019, marking the beginning of the first round of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process. Due to the large number of submissions and the short timeline of the process, NIST has decided to eliminate some of the algorithms from consideration early in the first evaluation phase in order to focus analysis on the more promising submissions. This report describes the evaluation criteria and selection process based on public feedback and internal review of the first-round candidates and provides the list of 32 candidate algorithms selected for the second round of the evaluation process.
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