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Playlist "25C3: nothing to hide"

An introduction to new stream cipher designs

Tor E. Bjørstad

Even with "nothing to hide", we want to protect the privacy of our bits and bytes. Encryption is an important tool for this, and stream ciphers are a major class of symmetric-key encryption schemes. Algorithms such as RC4 (used in WEP/WPA, bittorrent, SSL), A5/1 (GSM telephony), E0 (bluetooth), as well as AES in counter (CTR) mode, are important examples of stream ciphers used in everyday applications.