ASCON-KECCAK AEAD: A Novel Hardware Architecture for Cryptographic Processing

Lightweight authenticated encryption is crucial for resource constrained IoT applications, including medical implants and embedded sensors. ASCON, selected by NIST as the standard lightweight cryptography algorithm, provides the foundational encryption framework for this study. ASCON employs a 320-bit state with 12 rounds, whereas KECCAK-p[1600,24] offers a 1600-bit state and 24 rounds. To harness these strengths, we introduce ASCON–KECCAK AEAD, a hybrid construction that replaces the ASCON permutation with the KECCAK. This work presents the first hardware implementation of the ASCON–KECCAK AEAD algorithm. The proposed hardware design is validated on Kintex-7 and Artix-7 FPGA platforms, achieving a high throughput of 3.32 Gbps for ASCON-KECCAK and 20 Gbps for KECCAK-p[1600,24] permutation, while maintaining optimized resource utilization with 6523 LUTs for ASCON-KECCAK-256, 7126 LUTs for ASCON-KECCAK-512, and 2970 LUTs for KECCAK-p[1600,24] on Kintex-7. A novel refinement of the KECCAK Rho transformation is achieved through an AND driven modular operation, enabling a more efficient permutation design. Additionally, ASIC benchmarking further demonstrates its feasibility for hardware-constrained environments. A comparative analysis with the standard ASCON-128 AEAD demonstrates that the proposed design achieves a significantly higher figure of merit (TP/LUT), indicating superior area efficiency and throughput scalability. With the rising demand for secure cryptographic solutions, ASCON-KECCAK emerges as a highly secure and efficient algorithm, offering enhanced protection against key recovery and data integrity breaches in encryption and decryption processes.