Mercy: A Fast Large Block Cipher for Disk Sector Encryption

  • Authors:
  • Paul Crowley

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • FSE '00 Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption
  • Year:
  • 2000

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We discuss the special requirements imposed on the underlying cipher of systems which encrypt each sector of a disk partition independently, and demonstrate a certificational weakness in some existing block ciphers including Bellare and Rogaway's 1999 proposal, proposing a new quantitative measure of avalanche. To address these needs, we present Mercy, a new block cipher accepting large (4096-bit) blocks, which uses a key-dependent state machine to build a bijective F function for a Feistel cipher. Mercy achieves 9 cycles/byte on a Pentium compatible processor.