An Addendum to the ZUC-256 Stream Cipher

Bin Zhang; Dengguo Feng; Chenhui Jin; Wen-Feng Qi; Wenling Wu; Chao Xu; Yanfeng Wang; Lin Jiao

Paper 2021/1439

An Addendum to the ZUC-256 Stream Cipher

Bin Zhang, TCA Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190, Beijing, China, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

Dengguo Feng, TCA Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190, Beijing, China

Chenhui Jin, Information Engineering University, 450001, Zhengzhou, China

Wen-Feng Qi, Information Engineering University, 450001, Zhengzhou, China

Wenling Wu, TCA Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190, Beijing, China, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

Chao Xu, State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, P.O. Box 5159, Beijing, 100878, China

Yanfeng Wang, State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, P.O. Box 5159, Beijing, 100878, China

Lin Jiao, State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, P.O. Box 5159, Beijing, 100878, China

Abstract

ZUC-256 is a stream cipher, together with AES-256 and SNOW-V, proposed as the core primitive in future set of 3GPP confidentiality and integrity algorithms for the upcoming 5G applications which offer the 256-bit security. \\ While the original initialization scheme of ZUC-256 can work with a 256-bit key and an IV of length up to 184 bits, we describe a new initialization scheme of ZUC-256 that supports an IV of the exact 128 bits in this paper. Compared to the original initialization scheme, this new key/IV setup algorithm avoids the division of the whole key/IV byte and provides a simple and natural-looking initialization scheme for ZUC-256.

Note: This paper describes a new initialization scheme of ZUC-256 with 128-bit IV and its security analysis done by the ZUC design team.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Secret-key cryptography
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: 5G Stream ciphers ZUC 256-bit security.
Contact author(s): martin_zhangbin @ hotmail com
History: 2025-04-23: revised; 2021-10-27: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/1439
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/1439,
      author = {Bin Zhang and Dengguo Feng and Chenhui Jin and Wen-Feng Qi and Wenling Wu and Chao Xu and Yanfeng Wang and Lin Jiao},
      title = {An Addendum to the {ZUC}-256 Stream Cipher},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/1439},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1439}
}