ANCHOR: A New Proposed Stream Cipher for Smart Cards with Crypto Co-Processor

Abstract

A smart card is a small pocket-sized computer with limited resources used for secure data processing and storage. The card consists of different software and hardware components, including a microprocessor, crypto co-processor, RAM, secure ROM, and operating system. Even though smart cards have a lot of limitations in terms of processing power and small-sized memory, smart cards are widely used in many applications that require a high degree of security such as e-passports, citizen cards, e- banking, etc... Basically, the security of a smart card depends mainly on the security strength of the cipher algorithm implemented inside. This paper presents a new lightweight, high-speed, and cryptographically strong stream cipher algorithm (ANCHOR) suitable for implementation on smart cards. The building blocks of the proposed cipher were carefully built/chosen with high-valued cryptographic properties. The randomness and linear complexity properties of the proposed cipher algorithm have been successfully tested with statistical tests of the NIST suite and the Berlekamp- Massey algorithm respectively. In order to test the performance of the proposed cipher algorithm, the algorithm was developed in C language and executed on a Linux machine.