Authors:
Debjyoti Bhattacharjee
and
Anupam Chattopadhyay
Affiliation:
School of Computer Science and Engineering and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Keyword(s):
Stream Cipher, Hardware Accelerator, Spritz.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applied Cryptography
;
Cryptographic Techniques and Key Management
;
Data Engineering
;
Databases and Data Security
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Network Security
;
Wireless Network Security
Abstract:
RC4, the dominant stream cipher in e-commerce and communication protocols such as, WEP, TLS, is being
considered for replacement due to the series of vulnerabilities that have been pointed out in recent past. After
a thorough analysis of the possible weaknesses, Spritz, a new stream cipher is proposed to that effect by
the author of RC4. The design of Spritz is based on Cryptographic Sponge construction, which permits
Spritz to be used in different modes, and therefore, makes it an attractive design choice for security protocols.
Initial software performance analysis of Spritz shows that it fares poorly compared to the state-of-the-art hash
functions and stream ciphers. In this paper, we extend the analysis to the hardware performance. We propose
a fully customized accelerator design for Spritz and identify the highest achievable runtime performance for
ASIC and FPGA technology. Our results show that the Spritz accelerator is significantly faster in encryption
compared to the softwar
e implementation (32.38x speed-up for the SQUEEZE and 64.07x speed-up for the
ABSORB function), though fares weakly against hardware implementation of state-of-the-art hash functions
and stream ciphers in terms of area-efficiency.
(More)