  This survey is the first work on the current standard for lightweight
cryptography, standardized in 2023. Lightweight cryptography plays a vital role
in securing resource-constrained embedded systems such as deeply-embedded
systems (implantable and wearable medical devices, smart fabrics, smart homes,
and the like), radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, sensor networks, and
privacy-constrained usage models. National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) initiated a standardization process for lightweight
cryptography and after a relatively-long multi-year effort, eventually, in Feb.
2023, the competition ended with ASCON as the winner. This lightweight
cryptographic standard will be used in deeply-embedded architectures to provide
security through confidentiality and integrity/authentication (the dual of the
legacy AES-GCM block cipher which is the NIST standard for symmetric key
cryptography). ASCON's lightweight design utilizes a 320-bit permutation which
is bit-sliced into five 64-bit register words, providing 128-bit level
security. This work summarizes the different implementations of ASCON on
field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and ASIC hardware platforms on the basis
of area, power, throughput, energy, and efficiency overheads. The presented
work also reviews various differential and side-channel analysis attacks (SCAs)
performed across variants of ASCON cipher suite in terms of algebraic,
cube/cube-like, forgery, fault injection, and power analysis attacks as well as
the countermeasures for these attacks. We also provide our insights and visions
throughout this survey to provide new future directions in different domains.
This survey is the first one in its kind and a step forward towards
scrutinizing the advantages and future directions of the NIST lightweight
cryptography standard introduced in 2023.
