Hardware optimizations of stream cipher rabbit
Abstract
Stream ciphers form part of cryptographic primitives focused on privacy. Synchronous,
symmetric and software-oriented stream cipher Rabbit is member of final
portfolio of European Union’s eStream project. Although it was designed to perform
well in software, employed operations seem to compute efficiently in hardware. 128-
bit security, with no known security weaknesses is claimed by Rabbit’s designers.
Since hardware performance of Rabbit was only estimated in the proposal of algorithm,
comparison of direct and optimized FPGA implementations of Rabbit stream
cipher is presented, identifying algorithm bottlenecks, discussing optimization techniques
applied to algorithm computations, along with key area/time trade-offs.
symmetric and software-oriented stream cipher Rabbit is member of final
portfolio of European Union’s eStream project. Although it was designed to perform
well in software, employed operations seem to compute efficiently in hardware. 128-
bit security, with no known security weaknesses is claimed by Rabbit’s designers.
Since hardware performance of Rabbit was only estimated in the proposal of algorithm,
comparison of direct and optimized FPGA implementations of Rabbit stream
cipher is presented, identifying algorithm bottlenecks, discussing optimization techniques
applied to algorithm computations, along with key area/time trade-offs.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/tatra.v50i3.137