Stream cipher by reed-solomon codes

Abstract

Stream cipher can be used in constrained environments to provide information security and reduce energy expense at data transmission. In this paper, it is shown that Reed-Solomon (RS) code can be used to implement stream cipher, which is widely used for error corrections of data in transmission and storages. The proposed stream cipher combine the keys with the messages, and conceals the cipher within the erroneous RS code. Then at the receiving part the cipher can be checked out by RS decoding, leaving the information unchanged. There are several advantages with this scheme: First, compared with the usual stream cipher including two engines, only one engine is required, making the synchronization of the stream cipher and messages easily. In the situation, the stream cipher and the messages are held as a whole while the alignment of stream cipher is not needed. Thus the usual power consumptions for synchronization and key generation at the receiving part can be saved. Second, the stream cipher increases the security level by adding the difficulty of decoding a random linear RS code, which stores the key streams like public key cryptography. Since the RS encoding and decoding modules are already included in many computer systems or devices, the new scheme may be implemented by reconfiguration rather than extra hardware units. Compared with generalized RS code for code-based public-key cryptography like McEliece system, it uses systematic encoding instead of nonsystematic encoding, which decreases the power overhead. Unlike the encryption by public keys and decryption by private keys of McEliece system, it encrypts messages by private keys from stream cipher and decrypts texts by public keys implemented in the RS decoder.