Hardware Design and Analysis of the ACE and WAGE Ciphers
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents the hardware design and analysis of ACE and WAGE, two candidate ciphers for the NIST Lightweight Cryptography standardization. Both ciphers use sLiSCP's unified sponge duplex mode. ACE has an internal state of 320 bits, uses three 64 bit Simeck boxes, and implements both authenticated encryption and hashing. WAGE is based on the Welch-Gong stream cipher and provides authenticated encryption. WAGE has 259 bits of state, two 7 bit Welch-Gong permutations, and four lightweight 7 bit S-boxes. ACE and WAGE have the same external interface and follow the same I/O protocol to transition between phases. The paper illustrates how a hardware perspective influenced key aspects of the ACE and WAGE algorithms. The paper reports area, power, and energy results for both serial and parallel (unrolled) implementations using four different ASIC libraries: two 65 nm libraries, a 90 nm library, and a 130 nm library. ACE implementations range from a throughput of 0.5 bits-per-clock cycle (bpc) and an area of 4210 GE (averaged across the four ASIC libraries) up to 4 bpc and 7260 GE. WAGE results range from 0.57 bpc with 2920 GE to 4.57 bpc with 11080 GE.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it