Design Space Exploration of Galois and Fibonacci Configuration Based on Espresso Stream Cipher

Abstract

Fibonacci and Galois are two different kinds of configurations in stream ciphers. Although many transformations between two configurations have been proposed, there is no sufficient analysis of their FPGA performance. Espresso stream cipher provides an ideal sample to explore such a problem. The 128-bit secret key Espresso is designed in Galois configuration, and there is a Fibonacci-configured Espresso variant proved with the equivalent security level. To fully leverage the efficiency of two configurations, we explore the hardware optimization approaches toward area and throughput, respectively. In short, the FPGA-implemented Fibonacci cipher is more suitable for extremely resource-constrained or high-throughput applications, while the Galois cipher compromises both area and speed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically compare the FPGA performance of cipher configurations under relatively fair cryptographic security. We hope this work can serve as a reference for the cryptography hardware architecture research community.