Related - a week or so ago I was playing with ASCON[1], a sponge based cipher and hash function aimed at embedded systems. A passing thought was that it might b

Related - a week or so ago I was playing with ASCON[1], a sponge based cipher and hash function aimed at embedded systems. A passing thought was that it might be handy to use as a random number generator. When I read this post a couple days ago, out of curiosity I picked up the ASCON permutation and benchmarked it vs this one. It was unfortunately a bit slower: ~27 ns per 64-bit value (6 round permutation) vs ~4 ns for the included ChaCha8. I suspect it could be optimized, and run at the higher output rate (8 rounds per 128-bit output). One nice thing is that it does have a smaller state of only 40 bytes. But - for the performance, this ChaCha8 implementation is awesome! [1] https://ascon.iaik.tugraz.at https://ascon.iaik.tugraz.at