Light-weight Cryptography: Trivium

Our cryptography methods are often block based which require memory storage and have a considerable gate footprint for their implementation. For devices with limited storage space and processing requirements, the requirements of many block-based symmetric encryption methods cannot be feasibly implement.

We thus get light-weight cryptography method, and which have a lower processing requirement, and memory and gate footprint. With this, for symmetric key encryption, we often replace block cipher with stream ciphers. For this we generate an almost infinitely long key stream based on a key value and an IV (initialisation vector). The incoming bit stream is then EX-ORed with the key stream, and this is sent with the IV. On the other side, the key stream is recreated, and EX-OR with the cipher stream. This created the original data.

Trivium is a Light Weight Stream Cipher and was written by Martin Hell, Thomas Johansson and Willi Meier. It has a relatively low gate count, power consumption and memory. It has an 80-bit key, and has two shift registers and a nonlinear output function [paper]. Trivium It was created Christophe De Cannière and Bart Preneel, and has a low footprint for hardware. It…