Performance Analysis of eSTREAM Cipher Finalists: HC-128, Salsa20/12, Rabbit & SOSEMANUK

Abstract

Stream cipher algorithms are most powerful tools in symmetric cryptography. These algorithms perform either bit wise or byte wise encryption in a simple way just doing XOR operation between key and message (plain text). Stream cipher algorithms are about 5 to 10 times faster than AES, TDES (block cipher). In stream cipher, creating key stream by randomizing the bits is most important thing. These algorithms are useful normally in GSM mobile communication, Hard disk encryption, Multimedia encryption and fast Software encryption etc. In this thesis, those stream cipher finalists from eSTREAM project run by ECRYPT are studied, analyzed and implemented in Java Programming using NetBeans 8.0.2. Considering their other parameters constant, performance analysis is studied here in this thesis. The empirical performance shows that Rabbit cipher is found to be better if the message size is very small. When message size is increased, then performance of Rabbit decreases and performance of Salsa20/12 increases in a far better way as compared to other algorithms. HC128

has showed considerable performance in some cases of message size where as SOSEMANUK was found not to be good. Therefore, while inputting different and big size of message, performance of Salsa20/12 gets increased and it is found to be the best algorithm for the large size message in the targeted architecture computer.