Title: A novel stream cipher based on quasigroups and QG-PRNG

Authors: Umesh Kumar; V.C. Venkaiah

Addresses: School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, 500046, India ' School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, 500046, India

Abstract: Stream ciphers that use the XOR-function are vulnerable to known-plaintext and reused-key attacks. To overcome such shortcomings of the existing ciphers, we hereby propose a novel stream cipher based on a quasigroup and a pseudo-random number generator (QG-PRNG). The QG-PRNG is also defined in this paper. Novelty of the proposed cipher is that a keystream once generated can be reused multiple times. The proposed cipher is analysed against various attacks, including reused-key, chosen-ciphertext, chosen-plaintext, and known-plaintext attacks and was found it to be resistant to these attacks. The proposed cipher and QG-PRNG are implemented in C++, and the performance of the proposed cipher is compared with some existing quasigroup-based stream ciphers, finding that the proposed cipher is more efficient than the existing proposals. We also evaluated both the QG-PRNG and the proposed cipher using various statistical tests of the NIST-STS, and we found that both the schemes pass these tests.

Keywords: cryptography; Latin square; NIST test; QG-PRNG; quasigroup; stream cipher.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2023.135900

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2023 Vol.22 No.3/4, pp.411 - 435

Received: 31 Jan 2022
Accepted: 15 Aug 2022
Published online: 09 Jan 2024 *

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