Effective and Efficient Optimization in RC4 Stream
N. Sivasankari, A. Yogananth · International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Technology · 2014
RC4 is developed by Ron Rivest in 1987 for RSA (RivestShamir-Adleman) data security in the field of cryptography. Still it is most popular in many network protocols Such as SSL (Secure Socket Layer), TLS (Transport Layer Security) for communication security over internet due to its simplicity and ease of implementation. Stream cipher uses a simple method to generate a cipher text by combining the plain text with secret key by Exclusive OR operation .The security of stream cipher depends on the quality of the algorithm. Whenever the browser establishes a secure communication to a Web site, RC4 stream cipher is used. It also provides higher efficiency and speed than block cipher. The hardware implementation of cryptographic algorithm plays a significant role than software because of its real time high speed and security .The throughput of the hardware implementation of proposed design was N* clock frequency. Where N is the number of bits produced in every clock cycle.Hardware implementation of RC4 combine the idea of loop unrolling and pipeline that produces 2RC4 key stream bytes per Clock cycle. But in this power consumption and required area for this design are large.