Secure Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Ascon Lightweight Cryptography

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems require lightweight cryptographic primitives that provide strong security under strict constraints on area, latency, and timing predictability.Ascon, selected by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the standard for lightweight authenticated encryption, is well suited for such environments, yet application-oriented hardware implementations for WSN platforms remain underexplored.This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based Ascon architectures for secure WSN and IoT deployments, using iterative design with single permutation round and hybrid design with two-round unrolling across two FPGA classes.Implementations on Kintex UltraScale and Artix-7 devices achieve sub-microsecond deterministic latency, operating frequencies up to 273 MHz, and throughput (TP) between 300 and 620 Mbps, with resource usage as low as 1794 look-up tables (LUTs).A detailed hardware-to-hardware comparison with existing FPGA and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementations demonstrates the efficiency and design-space positioning of the proposed architectures.Application-level analysis, based on full multi-block cycle counts for 128-byte WSN-typical packets, shows support for hundreds of thousands of encrypted packets per second, exceeding the requirements of practical sensor-network workloads.The measured sub-microsecond latency and high TP demonstrate that the proposed architectures are well aligned with the performance and timing requirements of practical WSN and IoT deployments.

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