avr has aes extensions, surely arm cortex-m has similar. are those any good, are they used by the libs you mention?
Neither of those libraries uses any extensions. TweetNaCl is a famously minimal implementation of NaCl in portable C by the NaCl authors. Monocypher is a library 'loup-vaillant wrote as a sort of side project. TweetNaCl does see some use, but libsodium is the most popular NaCl implementation, and libsodium's author provides his own low-footprint misuse-resistant crypto API separately.
Neither TweetNaCl nor 'loup-vaillant's library really addresses the low-footprint concern.
Re:Cryptographic Right Answers
by loup-vaillant on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @01:57AM
(#16752341)
If they have hardware AES support, forget everything I said. Monocypher and TweetNacl are portable C, they don't use extensions of any kind.
If speed doesn't matter, TweetNaCl is even smaller.
If those aren't enough still, you may want to dive in, learn a ton about crypto (starting with https://www.crypto101.io/), and investigate the sponge construction, whose versatility may allow you to shrink the code even more. Perhaps. I'm in over my head at this point.