Welcome to the resource topic for 2025/1538
Title:
Evaluating Ascon in Secure Multi-Party Computation using Reverse Multiplication-Friendly Embeddings
Authors: Peter Schwarz, Erik Pohle, Aysajan Abidin, Bart Preneel
Abstract:We present the first systematic study on communication-efficient evaluation of the lightweight cipher family Ascon within secure multi-party computation (MPC).
By leveraging Ascon’s parallel, bit-oriented structure, we adapt its design using Reverse Multiplication-Friendly Embeddings (RMFEs, introduced by Cascudo et al.\ in CRYPTO’18) in a single-circuit evaluation, enabling efficient packing of groups of bits into field elements.
Our protocol, which uses relatively small RMFEs, achieves substantial reductions in communication cost compared to baseline MPC protocols.
For example, in a medium-sized setting (with n = 13 MPC parties), our protocol reduces the communication cost for an Ascon permutation by roughly 38\%.
For large amounts of parties (e.g., n=255), the reduction can reach 50\%.
These improvements are achieved even though RMFEs only pack a few bits per field element, due to favorable amortization of both substitution and linear layers.
We also provide a Boolean circuit implementation of Ascon in the MP-SPDZ framework, enabling straightforward benchmarking.
Our findings are particularly beneficial for bandwidth-constrained environments where the use of lightweight ciphers, such as Ascon, is necessary due to the resource limitations of client devices, as in the case of transciphering data from IoT sensors.
Since our optimizations target the Ascon permutation, they naturally extend to all cryptographic modes (encryption, decryption, hashing) defined for the standard.
ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1538
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