Operation Count as a Performance Predictor: An Empirical Study of Lightweight AEAD Schemes

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical model for estimating the performance of cryptographic algorithms based on operation counting at the specification level. Aside from the requirement of having 32-bit operations available on the target, the proposed approach avoids platform-dependent assumptions by deriving a cost metric directly from the number of operations required by an algorithm description. This enables early-stage, target-independent performance comparison. The model is evaluated using the NIST lightweight cryptography competition benchmark results, where it is shown to accurately approximate cycle counts across a diverse set of algorithms. The results indicate that operation counting can provide a consistent relative ordering of computational cost, and even a good order of magnitude approximation, despite its simplicity compared to empirical measurement methods. In addition, the model is applied to algorithms protected against side-channel attacks using first-order Boolean masking schemes implemented with ISW gadgets. While the method has not yet been formally validated for masked implementations, it is used as an exploratory indicator of the additional overhead introduced by the masking countermeasure. Overall, this work suggests that specification-level operation counting can serve as a practical and low-cost tool for early performance estimation and comparative analysis of unprotected, and possibly masked cryptographic implementations.