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A new SNOW stream cipher called SNOW-V

Ekdahl, Patrik LU ; Johansson, Thomas LU orcid ; Maximov, Alexander LU and Yang, Jing LU (2019) In IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology 2019(3). p.1-42
Abstract

In this paper we are proposing a new member in the SNOW family of stream ciphers, called SNOW-V. The motivation is to meet an industry demand of very high speed encryption in a virtualized environment, something that can be expected to be relevant in a future 5G mobile communication system. We are revising the SNOW 3G architecture to be competitive in such a pure software environment, making use of both existing acceleration instructions for the AES encryption round function as well as the ability of modern CPUs to handle large vectors of integers (e.g. SIMD instructions). We have kept the general design from SNOW 3G, in terms of linear feedback shift register (LFSR) and Finite State Machine (FSM), but both entities are updated to... (More)

In this paper we are proposing a new member in the SNOW family of stream ciphers, called SNOW-V. The motivation is to meet an industry demand of very high speed encryption in a virtualized environment, something that can be expected to be relevant in a future 5G mobile communication system. We are revising the SNOW 3G architecture to be competitive in such a pure software environment, making use of both existing acceleration instructions for the AES encryption round function as well as the ability of modern CPUs to handle large vectors of integers (e.g. SIMD instructions). We have kept the general design from SNOW 3G, in terms of linear feedback shift register (LFSR) and Finite State Machine (FSM), but both entities are updated to better align with vectorized implementations. The LFSR part is new and operates 8 times the speed of the FSM. We have furthermore increased the total state size by using 128-bit registers in the FSM, we use the full AES encryption round function in the FSM update, and, finally, the initialization phase includes a masking with key bits at its end. The result is an algorithm generally much faster than AES-256 and with expected security not worse than AES-256.

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Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
; ; and
organization
publishing date
type
Contribution to journal
publication status
published
subject
keywords
5G mobile system security, SNOW, Stream Cipher
in
IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology
volume
2019
issue
3
pages
42 pages
publisher
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
external identifiers
  • scopus:85073474086
ISSN
2519-173X
DOI
10.13154/tosc.v2019.i3.1-42
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
0a684644-8875-451a-8f9d-ac7ba5ada459
date added to LUP
2019-10-29 12:41:40
date last changed
2023-09-09 16:56:30
@article{0a684644-8875-451a-8f9d-ac7ba5ada459,
  abstract     = {{<p>In this paper we are proposing a new member in the SNOW family of stream ciphers, called SNOW-V. The motivation is to meet an industry demand of very high speed encryption in a virtualized environment, something that can be expected to be relevant in a future 5G mobile communication system. We are revising the SNOW 3G architecture to be competitive in such a pure software environment, making use of both existing acceleration instructions for the AES encryption round function as well as the ability of modern CPUs to handle large vectors of integers (e.g. SIMD instructions). We have kept the general design from SNOW 3G, in terms of linear feedback shift register (LFSR) and Finite State Machine (FSM), but both entities are updated to better align with vectorized implementations. The LFSR part is new and operates 8 times the speed of the FSM. We have furthermore increased the total state size by using 128-bit registers in the FSM, we use the full AES encryption round function in the FSM update, and, finally, the initialization phase includes a masking with key bits at its end. The result is an algorithm generally much faster than AES-256 and with expected security not worse than AES-256.</p>}},
  author       = {{Ekdahl, Patrik and Johansson, Thomas and Maximov, Alexander and Yang, Jing}},
  issn         = {{2519-173X}},
  keywords     = {{5G mobile system security; SNOW; Stream Cipher}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  number       = {{3}},
  pages        = {{1--42}},
  publisher    = {{Ruhr-Universität Bochum}},
  series       = {{IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology}},
  title        = {{A new SNOW stream cipher called SNOW-V}},
  url          = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.13154/tosc.v2019.i3.1-42}},
  doi          = {{10.13154/tosc.v2019.i3.1-42}},
  volume       = {{2019}},
  year         = {{2019}},
}