The Key and IV Setup of the Stream Ciphers HC-256 and HC-128

Author

Liu, Yunyi ; Qin, Tuanfa

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput. & Electron. Inf., Guangxi Univ., Nanning

Volume

2

fYear

2009

fDate

25-26 April 2009

Firstpage

430

Lastpage

433

Abstract

The key and IV setup algorithms of both HC-256 and HC-128 cipher are cryptanalyzed in this paper. Both ciphers are software-efficient stream ciphers, proposed as the candidates of ECRYPT Stream Cipher Project and selected into the final portfolio. Key-schedule is one of the most important parts of designing a security cipher. The weak key initialization process is a fatal potential weakness of a cipher. The analysis results show that the master keys K of HC-256 and HC-128 can be recovered from the states P and Q easily. Therefore, the key and IV setup algorithms is not perfect enough. Final, an enhanced algorithm is proposed base on subkey addition as block ciphers, to improve the security of stream ciphers.

Keywords

cryptography; ECRYPT Stream Cipher Project; HC-128 cipher; HC-256 cipher; block ciphers; security cipher; software-efficient stream ciphers; Communication system security; Computer networks; Computer security; Cryptography; Feedback; Filtering; GSM; Information security; Portfolios; Wireless communication; Cryptanalysis; HC-128; HC-256; Key and IV setup algorithm; Stream cipher;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Networks Security, Wireless Communications and Trusted Computing, 2009. NSWCTC '09. International Conference on

Conference_Location

Wuhan, Hubei

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-4223-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/NSWCTC.2009.111

Filename

4908497