Comparison of the Performance of Stream Ciphers for Wireless Communications

In this paper, the hardware implementations of four representative stream ciphers are compared in terms of performance and consumed area. The ciphers used for this comparison are the A5/1, E0, RC4 and Helix. The first three ones have been used for the security part of well-known standards, especially in wireless ones, while the Helix cipher is a recently introduced fast, word oriented, stream cipher. The designs were coded using VHDL language. For the hardware implementation of the designs, an FPGA device was used. The implementation results illustrate the hardware performance of each cipher in terms of throughput-to-area ratio. This ratio equals to: 0.86 for the RC4, 0.21 for the E0, 5.88 for the A5/1, and 2.45 for the Helix cipher.