In 2019, the NIST institute started a competition called lightweight cryptography (LWC), in order to select a new standard in the pioneers of lightweight cryptography including authenticated encryption schemes and abstract-creating functions. On March 29, 2021, out of 32 candidates in the second round of the competition, 10 candidates were nominated as finalists. One of the important criteria for selecting a competition finalist is the presence of a safe and efficient structure with design features suitable for environments with limited resources. This paper, examines the top 10 finalists for the LWC in terms of the operation mode, primitives and design features. Also, the number of primary calls used in the initial and final initialization phases of the designs, which determines the cost of the preprocessing and is an important criterion in the efficiency of the structure, is examined. Based on the studies performed, Sponge-duplex and Elephant, Romulus and Grain-128AEAD designs have good performance in terms of efficiency.
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