NIST / ASCON.

[cederom]

Suggested enhancement

Hello world from the NuttX project [1] :-) @acassis noticed this nice article on "Lightweight Cryptography" from NIST [2] mentioning Ascon-Based Lightweight Cryptography Standards for Constrained Devices (NIST Special Publication 800-232 [3]).

Is MBED TLS project planning to implement ASCON features?

Justification

Mbed TLS needs this because:

• this will be a world wide standard for embedded systems security.
• MBED TLS is already well established and recognized security-for-embedded project.
• it would be best to have one common single sourced implementation for ASCON from MBED TLS, which also assures proper security review, implementation, validation and updates.
• we already have MBED TLS support in NuttX, as probably other RTOS do, so we could update to have those new features.

Thanks for considering :-) Tomek

[1] https://github.com/apache/nuttx [2] https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2025/08/nist-finalizes-lightweight-cryptography-standard-protect-small-devices [3] https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/232/final

[yanesca]

Hi @cederom, thank you very much for your interest in Mbed TLS. That could indeed be a useful addition to the library, however it is not on our roadmap yet. This will have to compete with other useful improvements like EdDSA and PQC so it is hard to tell when we will be able to get to this.

[cederom]

Thank you @yanesca :-) Please keep us updated when its lands on the roadmap :-)

[yanesca]

Sure, will do :) Until then you can check out the current state of our roadmap here: https://mbed-tls.readthedocs.io/en/latest/project/roadmap/