RC4-AccSuite: A Hardware Acceleration Suite for RC4-Like Stream Ciphers

We present RC4-AccSuite, a hardware accelerator, which combines the flexibility of an application specific instruction set processor and the performance of an application specific IC for the most widely deployed commercial stream cipher RC4 and its eight prominent variants, including Spritz (CRYPTO-2014 Rump-session). Our carefully designed instruction set architecture reuses combinational and sequential logic at its various pipeline stages and memories, saving up to 41% in terms of area, compared with the individual cores, while the power budget being dictated primarily by the variant used. Moreover, using state replication, noticeable throughput performance enhancement in RC4 variants is achieved. RC4-AccSuite possesses extensibility for future variants of RC4 with little or no tweaking.

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