CAESAR competition
The open 2013–2019 competition meant to find successors to AES-GCM, which ended with a portfolio rather than a single winner.
The acronym stands for Competition for Authenticated Encryption: Security, Applicability, and Robustness, with Daniel J. Bernstein as secretary. The motivation was dissatisfaction with GCM: brittle under nonce reuse and hard to implement in constant time. Fifty-seven submissions arrived in 2014, followed by five years of public cryptanalysis in the spirit of the AES and SHA-3 contests.
In February 2019 six finalists were named across three use cases: lightweight (Ascon first, ACORN), high performance (AEGIS-128 and OCB) and defence in depth (Deoxys-II first, COLM). No standard came of it directly. The most tangible result arrived by way of NIST, which picked Ascon for lightweight cryptography in 2023.