NIST announces the publication of NIST Internal Report (IR) 8268, Status Report on the First Round of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process. NIST is in the process of selecting one or more authenticated encryption and hashing schemes suitable for constrained environments through a public, competition-like process. In February 2019, 57 candidate algorithms were submitted to NIST for consideration. Among these, 56 were accepted as first-round candidates in April 2019. This report describes the evaluation criteria and selection process based on public feedback and internal review of the first-round candidates and provides the list of 32 candidate algorithms selected for the second round of the evaluation process.

For more details about this standardization process, see the Lightweight Cryptography homepage.