Who developed the SNOW stream cipher family?
SNOW was developed by Thomas Johansson and Patrik Ekdahl at Lund University. It is a family of word-based synchronous stream ciphers.
Questions about SNOW
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What is the SNOW cipher used for in cellular networks?
SNOW 3G is chosen as the stream cipher for the 3GPP encryption algorithms UEA2 and UIA2. SNOW-V was a 2019 redesign built to match 5G cellular network speeds.
Why was the original SNOW cipher rejected from the NESSIE project?
During evaluation, weaknesses were discovered in SNOW, and as a result it was not included in the NESSIE suite of algorithms. The authors then developed version 2.0 to solve those weaknesses and improve performance.
What is the difference between SNOW 2.0 and SNOW 3G?
SNOW 3G is a further modification of the design made during ETSI SAGE evaluation to increase resistance against algebraic attacks. Related keys have been found for both SNOW 2.0 and SNOW 3G, allowing attacks against SNOW 2.0 in the related-key model.
How does SNOW-V achieve high speed for 5G?
SNOW-V uses a shift register of 32 16-bit words implemented as 4 128-bit SIMD registers, performing 8 LFSR iterations simultaneously and producing 128 bits of output per iteration. Its output transformation uses the Advanced Encryption Standard round function commonly implemented in hardware on recent processors.
What standards include the SNOW cipher?
SNOW 2.0 is one of the stream ciphers chosen for the ISO/IEC 18033-4 standard. SNOW has also been used in the ESTREAM project as a reference cipher for performance evaluation.