Who designed the MOSQUITO stream cipher?
MOSQUITO was designed by Joan Daemen and Paris Kitsos. They submitted it to the eSTREAM project, which was part of the eCRYPT initiative, and published their design rationale in 2005.
Questions about Mosquito
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What type of cipher is MOSQUITO?
MOSQUITO is a self-synchronizing stream cipher. It was built to recover automatically if errors occur during transmission, without requiring a manual resynchronization step.
Why did Daemen and Kitsos design MOSQUITO instead of using an existing cipher?
They argued that using a block cipher in CFB mode to achieve self-synchronizing encryption is very inefficient for single-bit operation. Their goal was a dedicated hardware-efficient design built specifically for self-synchronizing stream encryption.
How was MOSQUITO broken and by whom?
Antoine Joux and Frederic Muller broke MOSQUITO in 2006 using differential chosen ciphertext attacks. They showed that all ciphers in the KNOT-MOSQUITO family were vulnerable to this technique.
What happened to MOUSTIQUE, the successor to MOSQUITO?
MOUSTIQUE reached Phase 3 of the eSTREAM evaluation as the only self-synchronizing cipher remaining in the competition. It was subsequently broken by Kasper and colleagues, leaving the design of a secure self-synchronizing stream cipher as an open research problem.
What are the register sizes in the MOSQUITO cipher?
MOSQUITO uses eight registers of varying lengths. The main CCSR register holds 128 bits, followed by registers of 53 bits, 12 bits, and 3 bits among the others.