A comparison between the message embedded cryptosystem and the self-synchronous stream cipher Mosquito

It is widely admitted that most of chaotic cryptosystems belong to the class of symmetric key ciphers but few of them have really been compared with standard existing ones. As a consequence, their design often resorts to empirical approaches with trial-and-error settings. This paper must be considered as an attempt to handle such a situation. An in-depth comparison between a fully-fledged self-synchronous stream cipher called Mosquito and one of the most promising chaotic cryptosystem, namely hybrid message-embedding, is carried out. It is given a correspondence between the design parameters involved in the two respective schemes, in particular the size of the secret key, the required memory, the dimension of the system. Furthermore, we put a special emphasis on the link between the notion of relative degree of a dynamical system and the concept of pipelining.