Salsa20/12

I've been off the grid for the last couple of months, heads-down on a project. ...a fun and challenging project. Now that I've come up for air, I notice Salsa20/12 (Salsa20 with 12 rounds) has been selected one of the eSTREAM finalists. Congratulations to Daniel Bernstein.

I conclude from my re-read of the final report and other materials that Salasa20/12 is indeed the preferred software algorithm for Profile 1. Depending on where you look, Rabbit and Sosemanuk also received high marks, but it was Salsa20/12 that was consistently on top. ...and because Rabbit has commercial-use IP restrictions, Sosemanuk easily takes second place. (eSTREAM was careful not to get involved in the politics of being so explicit.)

While I've played some with Sosemanuk, I've actually been using Salsa20 for a while now. I'm pleased. One question though, ought not it be named "Salsa12" to help avoid confusion?

More on Salsa20 and other eSTREAM ciphers....
    Fast stream ciphers from eSTREAM
    Python access to CryptMT, Dragon, HC, LEX, NLS, Rabbit

Updated: 6Jun08
 

Python access to CryptMT, Dragon, HC, LEX, NLS, Rabbit (eSTREAM ciphers)

The last couple of months have been heads down and very long hours with my day job. I'm back now to personal projects and put together another Python wrapper for these ciphers using the eSTREAM APIs. See http://www.seanet.com/~bugbee/crypto
 

Fast stream ciphers from eSTREAM

Several years ago the EU (European Union), through a project called NESSIE, analyzed and recommended a number of cryptographic primitives. You can learn more about NESSIE from the links below. One category in which they were not satisfied and made no recommendation is stream ciphers, so they launched a new project, eSTREAM, expressly for the evaluation of stream ciphers. eSTREAM is now in Phase 3, the final evaluation phase, and there are a number of promising candidates.
    NESSIE
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NESSIE
        https://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/nessie/
    eSTREAM
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESTREAM
        http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/

Personally, I like Salsa20. I benchmarked Salsa20 as encrypting over 100 MB per second on a lowly 1.5 GHz G4 PPC mini Mac. ...128-bit encryption strength, memory resident data (no I/O), and before Python's GC kicked in. This is more than 3x faster than AES-128 on the same machine. Others I like are Sosemanuk and Phelix, but Phelix didn't advance to Phase 3. Ugh. Well, two out of three isn't bad.

The core routines are written in C so I wrote ctypes wrappers to access Salsa20, Sosemanuk, Phelix and others. I'm making that code available, free for any use.
        http://www.seanet.com/~bugbee/crypto

Enjoy.