They chose Ascon which is a good set of same sponge-based cryptographic functions if you don't have hardware acceleration for AES or the CPU resources for chach

They chose Ascon which is a good set of same sponge-based cryptographic functions if you don't have hardware acceleration for AES or the CPU resources for chacha20 which is the intention of the standard. The security is 128-bits (comparable to AES-128). <https://ascon.isec.tugraz.at/specification.html https://ascon.isec.tugraz.at/specification.html>