SNOW 4149152 203972253 2008-04-07T12:45:08Z Fragglet 239080 :''This article is about the stream cipher. For the MI5 agent, see [[Arthur Owens]].'' '''SNOW 1.0''' and '''2.0''' are two word-based synchronous stream ciphers developed by Thomas Johansson and Patrik Ekdahl at [[Lund University]]. SNOW 1.0, originally simply SNOW, was submitted to the [[NESSIE]] project. The cipher has no known intellectual property or other restrictions. The cipher works on 32-bit words and supports both 128- and 256-bit keys. The cipher consists of a combination of a [[LFSR]] and a [[Finite State Machine]] (FSM) where the LFSR also feeds the next state function of the FSM. The cipher has a short initialization phase and very good performance on both 32-bit processors and in hardware. During the NESSIE evaluation, weaknesses were discovered and as a result, SNOW was not included in the NESSIE suite of algorithms. The authors have developed a new version, version 2.0 of the cipher, that solves the weaknesses and improves the performance. SNOW has been used in the [[ESTREAM]] project as a reference cipher for the performance evaluation. ==External links== * [http://www.it.lth.se/cryptology/snow/ The SNOW website] {{Crypto navbox | stream}} [[Category:Stream ciphers]]