Recent developments in the design of conventional cryptographic algorithms

Abstract

This paper examines proposals for three cryptographic prim- itives: block ciphers, stream ciphers, and hash functions. It provides an overview of the design principles of a large number of recent proposals, which includes the global structure, the number of rounds, the way of in- troducing non-linearity and diffusion, and the key schedule. The software performance of about twenty primitives is compared based on highly op- timized implementations for the Pentium. The goal of the paper is to provided a technical perspective on the wide variety of primitives that exist today.