About

"The Greek goddess Athena was frequently called upon to settle disputes between the gods or various mortals. Athena Goddess of Wisdom was known for her superb logic and intellect. Her decisions were usually well-considered, highly ethical, and seldom motivated by self-interest."

from "Athena, Greek Goddess of Wisdom and Craftsmanship"

ATHENa: Automated Tools for Hardware EvaluatioN is a project started at George Mason University, aimed at fair, comprehensive, and automated evaluation of hardware cryptographic cores targeting FPGAs, All Programmable Systems on Chip, and ASICs.

Our project has been inspired by a similar environment for comparing software implementations of cryptography, developed by Daniel Bernstein and Tanja Lange,  called eBACS (ECRYPT Benchmarking of Cryptographic Systems).

Our design and benchmarking methodologies allow the comparison of

  1. Cryptographic algorithms, e.g., candidates in the PQC, LWC, CAESAR, and SHA-3 contests
  2. Cryptographic architectures and implementations, e.g., basic iterative vs. unrolled, GMU implementation vs. Bochum implementation
  3. Hardware platforms, e.g., Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ vs. Altera Stratix 10
  4. Languages and tools, e.g., VHDL vs. Verilog, Xilinx Vivado 2022.1 vs. Xilinx Vivado 2019.1.

Image of Athena Goddess courtesy of Carolyn Angus.