Stream cipher designs: a review

Abstract

Stream cipher is an important branch of symmetric cryptosystems, which takes obvious advantages in speed and scale of hardware implementation. It is suitable for using in the cases of massive data transfer or resource constraints, and has always been a hot and central research topic in cryptography. With the rapid development of network and communication technology, cipher algorithms play more and more crucial role in information security. Simultaneously, the application environment of cipher algorithms is increasingly complex, which challenges the existing cipher algorithms and calls for novel suitable designs. To accommodate new strict requirements and provide systematic scientific basis for future designs, this paper reviews the development history of stream ciphers, classifies and summarizes the design principles of typical stream ciphers in groups, briefly discusses the advantages and weakness of various stream ciphers in terms of security and implementation. Finally, it tries to foresee the prospective design directions of stream ciphers.

A comprehensive taxonomy of security and privacy issues in RFID

“…It combines pseudo-random shared key with the plaintext to perform the encryption of plaintext. There are various types of stream ciphers with regard to its structure such as linear-feedback shift register (LFSR), nonlinear feedback shift register (NFSR), shift register with carry feedback (FCSR), PANAMA, random shuffled, addition/rotation/XOR (ARX) [74]. Table 3 presents an analysis of various existing lightweight stream ciphers.…”

“…There are various existing stream ciphers presented by the various researchers [76,78,79]. However, these suffer from various limitations such as exhaustive key search attack, related key attack, and algebraic attack [74,117]. Hence, to construct a stream cipher that can deal with all such limitations is a challenge for the researchers working in the area of developing secure and efficient RFID systems.…”

SPHERE: A Multi-SoC Architecture for Next-Generation Cyber-Physical Systems Based on Heterogeneous Platforms

“…In fact, as shown in Figure 3, the shell contains one isolation module for each hardware task, which act as a gate between the task and the rest of the system. From the application's perspective, this module can support online encryption/decryption of bus transactions [18], relying on a high-throughput hardware stream cypher [19], which establish a form of confidentiality of information flows outside the perimeter of the hardware task and the (trusted) shell region. More importantly, from the system's perspective, the isolation modules can serve as firewalls monitoring the traffic patterns generated by the hardware tasks.…”

Using Hadamard transform for cryptanalysis of pseudo-random generators in stream ciphers

“…A stream cipher algorithm is simply specifying a pseudorandom generator, which allows to encrypt messages of arbitrary length by combining the bit sequence produced with the message by exclusive-OR operation, symbol by symbol [14]. When designing stream ciphers, a number of properties must be taken into account besides generating randomly looking bit sequences [15]; the generated sequence must present the most unpredictable behavior possible, i.e., given a fraction of the sequence, it should not be possible to predict the rest, either before or after the given subsequence.…”