Software Implementation and Comparison of ZUC-256, SNOW-V, and AES-256 on RISC-V Platform

As candidates for cryptographic primitives in 5G communication, ZUC-256, SNOW-V, and AES-256 offer the 256-bit security in terms of confidentiality and integrity. There have been some studies on software implementations on different platforms for them. In this paper, ZUC-256, SNOW-V, and AES-256 are implemented in the standard C language on RISC-V CPU without AES new instructions. Their implementation performances are measured and compared from two aspects including keystream generation and message authentication code generation, and the results suggest that ZUC-256 is faster than SNOW-V and AES-256 algorithms on RISC-V platform.