Improving the Diffusion of the Stream Cipher Salsa20 by Employing a Chaotic Logistic Map
Mishal Almazrooie, Azman Samsudin, Manmeet Mahinderjit Singh · Journal of Information Processing Systems · 2015
The stream cipher Salsa20 and its reduced versions are among the fastest stream ciphers available today. However, Salsa20/7 is broken and Salsa20/12 is not as safe as before. Therefore, Salsa20 must completely perform all of the four rounds of encryption to achieve a good diffusion in order to resist the known attacks. In this paper, a new variant of Salsa20 that uses the chaos theory and that can achieve diffusion faster than the original Salsa20 is presented. The method has been tested and benchmarked with the original Salsa20 with a series of tests. Most of the tests show that the proposed chaotic Salsa of two rounds is faster than the original four rounds of Salsa20/4, but it offers the same diffusion level.