# Study About the Performance of Ascon in Arduino Devices
## 3 Ascon as Authenticated Encryption
### Some Application Domains for Ascon in Arduino-Based Systems  
Given its efficiency on constrained devices, Ascon has strong potential for adoption in real-world applications such as smart home automation, industrial IoT, automotive keyless entry systems, and wearable health devices. Since Arduino-based microcontrollers are widely used for prototyping and small-scale deployments in these domains, it is important to evaluate how Ascon performs under their typical hardware constraints. Ascon has been designed for environments where computational resources are severely constrained. Due to its simplicity, efficiency, and minimal memory footprint, Ascon can be deployed on a wide range of microcontrollers, from low-end 8-bit architectures such as those found in Arduino boards, to more specialized 32-bit embedded processors used in automotive, industrial, and medical applications. Arduino microcontrollers, such as those presented in this study, are widely adopted in prototyping, academic research, and small-scale IoT applications. Their open hardware ecosystem, low cost, and broad community support make them ideal platforms for validating lightweight cryptographic algorithms under real-world constraints. Recent hardware implementations demonstrate that Ascon performs efficiently even on low-power microcontrollers with limited RAM (random access memory) and CPU (central processing unit) cycles, maintaining real-time communication without introducing measurable latency or energy overhead [14; 15]. This has enabled its integration into diverse application domains, including the following:  
* Home automation and smart devices: In smart home applications, Arduino boards are commonly used to control lighting systems, electronic locks, motion detectors, and environmental sensors. These devices typically communicate over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Zigbee protocols, making them susceptible to replay, spoofing, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Ascon's lightweight authenticated encryption enables secure communication between nodes, especially in constrained devices with less than 32 KB of RAM [15]. * Smart agriculture and environmental monitoring: Low-power sensor nodes deployed in agricultural environments often rely on boards like Arduino MKR WAN 1310 with LoRa (long-range) connectivity to monitor soil moisture, temperature, or air quality. Because these sensors operate autonomously for long periods, data encryption must be both energy-efficient and robust. Ascon meets these requirements, offering authenticated encryption with a code footprint of less than 10 KB, and minimal CPU usage [16]. * Urban sensing and smart cities: Academic and experimental deployments in smart city infrastructures frequently use Arduino-based networks to monitor variables such as CO\({}_{2}\) levels, traffic density, and ambient noise. These applications require secure transmission of public data across distributed systems. Incorporating Ascon allows end-to-end encryption and data integrity checks, without impacting real-time data acquisition and transmission performance. While Arduino platforms are sufficient for prototyping and low-volume applications, many industrial, automotive, and medical systems rely on certified microcontrollers with higher performance and robustness requirements. Nevertheless, the demonstrated efficiency of Ascon on constrained devices suggests it can be equally or even more effective in these professional-grade systems, while also contributing to reducing power consumption and production costs, particularly in battery-powered or mass-deployable solutions. One promising area for such deployment is automotive keyless entry systems. These systems rely on low-frequency RF (radio frequency) transceivers embedded in key fobs and vehicle receivers to authenticate users. However, their vulnerability to relay and replay attacks has been widely documented.