A new stream cipher HC-256

Abstract

Stream cipher HC-256 is proposed in this paper. It generates keystream from a 256-bit secret key and a 256-bit initialization vector. HC-256 consists of two secret tables, each one with 1024 32-bit elements. The two tables are used as S-Box alternatively. At each step one element of a table is updated and one 32-bit output is generated. The encryption speed of the C implementation of HC-256 is about 1.9 bit per clock cycle (4.2 clock cycle per byte) on the Intel Pentium 4 processor. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2004.