SecureCom97: The Computer and Telecommunications Security Forum
April 27-May 1 1997
INVITED TALK: High-Speed, High-Quality Encryption in Software
S. Raj Rajagopalan, Research Scientist, Security and Cryptology Group,
Bellcore
The growth of the Internet as the medium for the transfer of proprietary
data faces a fundamental obstacle: the lack of a fast and secure encryption
algorithm to ensure the privacy of data in a heterogeneous networked environment.
Some existing solutions like DES are believed to be highly secure but they
do not perform well enough in software for many high-speed applications.
Other solutions are fast in software but they do not have the trust of
practitioners and cannot be related to any known trusted encryption algorithm.
VRA Encryption is a new encryption algorithm that has provable security
properties based on any trusted block cipher, and at the same time is fast
enough in software for most high-speed applications. Furthermore, VRA Encryption
has the feature of trading off security for speed or for memory, thereby
allowing the user to tune the security level that is desired for each application.
Our VRA Encryption prototype uses Triple-DES as the trusted cipher and
is capable of encrypting a real-time duplex video conferencing application
without any visible deterioration in quality. The talk will summarize our
recent results on VRA Encryption and related areas.
