The security of resource-constrained devices is critical in the IoT field, given that everything is interconnected. Therefore, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initialized the lightweight cryptography (LWC) project to standardize the lightweight cryptography algorithms for resource-constrained devices. After two rounds, the NIST announced the finalists in 2021. The finalist algorithms are Ascon, Elephant, GIFT-COFB, Grain-128AEAD, ISAP, PHOTON-Beetle, Romulus, SPARKLE, TinyJambu, and Xoodyak. The final round of the competition is still in progress, and the NIST will select the winner based on their and third-party evaluations. In this paper, we review the 10 finalists mentioned above, discuss their constructions, and classify them according to the underlying primitives. In particular, we analyze these ciphers from different perspectives, such as cipher specifications and structures, design primitives, security parameters, advantages and disadvantages, and existing cryptanalyses. We also review existing analyses of these finalists with a specific focus on the review of fault attacks. We hope the study compiled in this paper will benefit the cryptographic community by providing an easy-to-grasp overview of the NIST LWC finalists.

Lattice-based cryptography is centered around the hardness of problems on lattices. A lattice is a grid of points that stretches to infinity. With the development of quantum computers, existing cryptographic schemes are at risk because the underlying mathematical problems can, in theory, be easily solved by quantum computers. Since lattice-based mathematical problems are hard to be solved even by quantum computers, lattice-based cryptography is a promising foundation for future cryptographic schemes. In this paper, we focus on lattice-based public-key encryption schemes. This survey presents the current status of the lattice-based public-key encryption schemes and discusses the existing implementations. Our main focus is the learning with errors problem (LWE problem) and its implementations. In this paper, the plain lattice implementations and variants with special algebraic structures such as ring-based variants are discussed. Additionally, we describe a class of lattice-based functions called lattice trapdoors and their applications.

Security models for two-party authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols have developed over time to prove the security of AKE protocols even when the adversary learns certain secret values. In this work, we address more granular leakage: partial leakage of long-term secrets of protocol principals, even after the session key is established. We introduce a generic key exchange security model, which can be instantiated allowing bounded or continuous leakage, even when the adversary learns certain ephemeral secrets or session keys. Our model is the strongest known partial-leakage-based security model for key exchange protocols. We propose a generic construction of a two-pass leakage-resilient key exchange protocol that is secure in the proposed model, by introducing a new concept: the leakage-resilient NAXOS trick. We identify a special property for public-key cryptosystems: pair generation indistinguishability, and show how to obtain the leakage-resilient NAXOS trick from a pair generation indistinguishable leakage-resilient public-key cryptosystem.

The authentication of digital images poses a significant challenge due to the wide range of image forgery techniques employed, with one notable example being a copy-move forgery. This form of forgery involves duplicating and relocating segments of an image within the same image, often accompanied by geometric transformations to deceive viewers into perceiving the forged image as authentic. Furthermore, additional processing techniques like scaling, rotation, JPEG compression, and the application of Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) are frequently employed to further obscure any traces of forgery, making the detection and verification process even more complex. This paper presents a novel approach for detecting copy-move forgery in digital images using the self-supervised image keypoint detector, SuperPoint. Our approach leverages the advanced capabilities of SuperPoint, which combines keypoint detection and descriptor extraction, to identify and localize copy-move forgery accurately. One important aspect of our approach is its ability to handle images with different textures, including smooth and self-similar structural images. The proposed approach is able to produce stable results in images with various attacks, making it a functional and reliable tool for detecting copy-move forgery in a diverse range of forged images. Comparative analysis with existing forgery detection methods shows the superior performance of our proposed approach. Furthermore, the computational efficiency of our algorithm enables real-time forgery detection. Our approach using SuperPoint offers an effective solution for detecting copy-move forgery in digital images, making it valuable for image forensics and authenticity.