Paper 2005/413

VEST Hardware-Dedicated Stream Ciphers

Sean O'Neil, Benjamin Gittins, and Howard A. Landman

Abstract

VEST ciphers are based on bijective non-linear parallel feedback shift registers assisted by non-linear Residue Number System (RNS) based counters. Four VEST cipher family trees are introduced: 80-bit secure VEST-4, 128-bit secure VEST-8, 160-bit secure VEST-16 and 256-bit secure VEST-32. VEST ciphers return 4 to 32 bits of output per clock cycle while occupying ~5K to ~22K ASIC gates including the finite state machine logic overhead. All VEST ciphers support family keying, variable key sizes and instant re-keying. VEST ciphers are designed exploiting all the advantages of ASIC and FPGA hardware offering high-speed encryption with very low latency and substantial performance improvements comparing with general-purpose or software ciphers implemented in the same area.