The Salsa20 Family of Stream Ciphers

  • Authors:
  • Daniel J. Bernstein

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science (M/C 249), The University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607---7045

  • Venue:
  • New Stream Cipher Designs
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Salsa20 is a family of 256-bit stream ciphers designed in 2005 and submitted to eSTREAM, the ECRYPT Stream Cipher Project. Salsa20 has progressed to the third round of eSTREAM without any changes. The 20-round stream cipher Salsa20/20 is consistently faster than AES and is recommended by the designer for typical cryptographic applications. The reduced-round ciphers Salsa20/12 and Salsa20/8 are among the fastest 256-bit stream ciphers available and are recommended for applications where speed is more important than confidence. The fastest known attacks use ≈ 2153simple operations against Salsa20/7, ≈ 2249simple operations against Salsa20/8, and ≈ 2255simple operations against Salsa20/9, Salsa20/10, etc. In this paper, the Salsa20 designer presents Salsa20 and discusses the decisions made in the Salsa20 design.