Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2007/044

Design and Primitive Specification for Shannon

Philip Hawkes and Cameron McDonald and Michael Paddon and Gregory Rose and Miriam Wiggers de Vries

Abstract: Shannon is a synchronous stream cipher with message authentication functionality, designed according to the ECrypt NoE call for stream cipher primitives, profile 1A (but well after the call). Shannon is named in memory of Claude E. Shannon[20] of Bell Labs and MIT, founder of Information Theory. Shannon is an entirely new design, influenced by members of the SOBER family of stream ciphers, Helix/Phelix, Trivium, Scream, and SHA-256. It consists of a single 32-bit wide, 16-element nonlinear feedback shift register and an extra word, which is supplemented for message authentication with 32 parallel CRC-16 registers. Shannon is free to use for any purpose, and reference source code can be found at http://www.qualcomm.com.au/Shannon.html .

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / Stream cipher, message authentication

Date: received 12 Feb 2007

Contact author: ggr at qualcomm com

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Version: 20070214:110001 (All versions of this report)

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