Comparison of the hardware architectures and FPGA implementations of stream ciphers

Abstract

In this paper, the hardware implementations of five representative stream ciphers are compared in terms of performance and consumed area. The ciphers used for the comparison are the A5/1, W7, E0, RC4 and Helix. The first three ones have been used for the security part of well-known standards. The Helix cipher is a recently introduced fast, word oriented, stream cipher. The W7 algorithm has been recently proposed as a more trustworthy solution for GSM, due to the security problems that occurred concerning the A5/1 strength. The designs were coded using the 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: 5.88 for the A5/1, 1.26 for the W7, 0.21 for the E0, 2.45 for the Helix and 0.86 for the RC4.