Synaptic Laboratories' (Final) VEST submission has been accepted in the second round of the ECRYPT eSTREAM competition in the hardware stream cipher with associated authentication method division.
The (final) VEST specifications represents three full years of uninterrupted hardware-dedicated cipher research and development by the Synaptic Laboratories team.
The completed submission represents extensive internal cryptanalysis and design exploration over the previous submission. All components of the VEST cipher were extensively reviewed for subtle performance and security improvements resulting in minor modifications made to perfect the unchallenged (Provisional) VEST cipher system.
Analysis of fan-in for 3 bits over two rounds of an 83-bit accumulator
The security tweaks included:
- a streamlined keying process resulting in a significant reduction in
hardware implementation complexity and circuit area;
- improved choice of feedback functions for the RNS counters resulting in a
stronger more balanced counter output with longer periods;
- new bit permutations with improved fan-in and fan-out distribution for all VEST cores;
- support for native (single-pass) authenticated encryption in all VEST cores.
The VEST cipher continues to maintain its existing well studied structure and conservative security margins. Due to the careful integration of the improvements, all automated tools developed to study the (Provisional) VEST ciphers can be effortlessly adopted to study the (Final) VEST cipher.
The final specifications included additional information on how VEST's performance can be maximized:
- an instant full keying protocol; (minimum of 1 clock-cycle latency)
- formalised the recommendation for key-lengths to be equal or larger than 2 times the claimed security in bits; (80-bit security, 160-bit key)
- an arbitrary scalable counter mode of operation for VEST-MAC and VEST-HASH;
The VEST cryptosystem is now available for general licensing.
Synaptic Laboratories is voted onto the board of directors of the association of the pole of competitiveness "Transactions Électroniques Sécurisées".
Pole-TES has 65 members including 54 companies. The Pole-TES board comprises representatives from a total of 14 organisations including Atos Worldline, CEV Group, ENSICAEN, France Telecom, Gemalto, Groupement des Cartes Bancaires « CB », Oberthur Card Systems, Philips France and Université de Caen Basse-Normandie.
Synaptic Laboratories (Provisional) VEST submission has advanced strongly to Phase 2 of the ECRYPT eSTREAM competition with a completely unchallenged security record.
Synaptic Laboratories's (Provisional) VEST submission is accepted in the ECRYPT eSTREAM competition in the hardware stream cipher with associated authentication method division.
The European Network of Excellence for Cryptology (ECRYPT) is a 4-year network of excellence funded within the Information Societies Technology (IST) Programme of the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) under contract number IST-2002-507932. It falls under the action line Towards a global dependability and security framework. ECRYPT was launched on February 1st, 2004.
Its objective is to intensify the collaboration of European researchers in information security, and more in particular in cryptology and digital watermarking. The eSTREAM project manages and co-ordinates a multi-year effort to identify new stream ciphers suitable for widespread adoption as a de facto standard.
ECRYPT coordinates over 32 organisations including Ericsson AB (Sweden), France Telecom, Gemalto, IBM Research GmbH (Switzerland), MasterCard Europe sprl (Belgium), Vodafone Group Services Ltd (UK) and over 20 leading European universities.
VEST is the only eSTREAM submission to offer collision-resistant hashing. VEST achieves this by reusing the stream-cipher logic.
The prototype 'ACID' hardware cipher, with an internally estimated 88-bit security has achieved 10+ Gigabit/s static-timing result in the slow Actel AX2000 FPGA.
Synaptic Laboratories submit the prototype cipher to a cryptographic team led by Ed Dawson (Publications) to perform an independent preliminary cryptanalysis of the estimated security of 'ACID' and particularly on the security of the accumulator core.
Synaptic Laboratories begin design of the 'ACID' cipher targeted exclusively to the Actel AX2000 Fuse Based (Partial 6-to-1) FPGA architecture. The cipher is explicitly required to exploit massive parallelism and sustain 10 Gigabit/s in FPGA.
