Design, Implementation and Cryptanalysis of Modern Symmetric Ciphers

The main objective of this thesis is to examine the trade-offs between security and efficiency within symmetric ciphers. This includes the influence that block ciphers have on the new generation of word-based stream ciphers. By incorporating block-cipher like components into their designs, word-based stream ciphers have experienced hundreds-fold improvement in speed over bit-based stream ciphers, without any observable security degradation. The thesis also emphasizes the importance of keying issues in block and stream ciphers, showing that by reusing components of the principal cipher algorithm in the keying algorithm, security can be enhanced without loss of key-agility or expanding footprint in software memory. Firstly, modern block ciphers from four recent cipher competitions are surveyed and categorized according to criteria that includes the high-level structure of the block cipher, the method in which non-linearity is instilled into each round, and the strength of the key schedule. In assessing the last criterion, a classification by Carter [45] is adopted and modified to improve its consistency. The classification is used to demonstrate that the key schedule of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) [62] is surprisingly flimsy for a national standard. The claim is supported with statistical evidence that shows the key schedule suffers from bit leakage and lacks sufficient diffusion. The thesis contains a replacement key schedule that reuses components from the cipher algorithm, leveraging existing analysis to improve security, and reducing the cipher’s implementation footprint while maintaining key agility. The key schedule is analyzed from the perspective of an efficiency-security tradeoff, showing that the new schedule rectifies an imbalance towards efficiency present in the original. The thesis contains a discussion of the evolution of stream ciphers, focusing on the migration from bit-based to word-based stream ciphers, from which follows a commensurate improvement in design flexibility and software performance. It