Title: A mesh check-sum ABFT scheme for stream ciphers

Authors: Chang N. Zhang, Xiao Wei Liu

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, TRLabs, Regina, SK, S4S 0A2, Canada. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, TRLabs, Regina, SK, S4S 0A2, Canada

Abstract: To enhance the security and reliability of the widely-used stream ciphers, a novel mesh check-sum ABFT scheme for stream ciphers is developed. By utilising the ready-made arithmetic unit in stream ciphers, single and multiple errors can be detected and corrected in a cheap way. To meet different requirements in practical applications, 4-D mesh check-sum ABFT scheme is proposed which can be applied to RC4 or other stream ciphers. The 2-D mesh check-sum ABFT scheme is able to detect and correct single error with high efficiency. The 4-D mesh check-sum ABFT scheme is capable of correcting up to three errors located randomly in an N-element matrix with acceptable computation and bandwidth overhead. The workload can be remarkably reduced when most communications are error-free. Our scheme also provides one-to-one mapping between index and check-sum, so that error can be located and recovered by easier logic and simpler operation.

Keywords: stream ciphers; algorithm-based fault tolerance; error detection; error correction; RC4; parity; mesh check sum; arithmetic unit; matrix computation; exclusive or.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2009.027595

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2009 Vol.3 No.4, pp.285 - 300

Published online: 03 Aug 2009 *

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