Keystreams are used in the one-time pad cipher and in most stream ciphers. Block ciphers can also be used to produce keystreams. For example, the CTR mode (also known as Integer Counter Mode (ICM)) is a block mode that makes a block cipher produce a keystream then turns the block cipher into a stream cipher.
Example[change | change source]
In this simple example we will use only the English alphabet of 26 characters from a-z, therefore we will not encrypt numbers, commas, spaces and other symbols. As we have only 26 characters the random numbers in the keystream have to be at least between 0 and 25.
To encrypt we add the keystream numbers to the plaintext. And to decrypt we subtract the same keystream numbers from the ciphertext to get the plaintext.
If a ciphertext number becomes larger than 25 we wrap it to a value between 0-25. I.e. 26 becomes 0 and 27 becomes 1 and so on. (Such wrapping is called modular arithmetic.)
Here the plaintext message "attack at dawn" is combined by addition with the keystream "kjcngmlhylyu" and produces the ciphertext "kcvniwlabluh".
|Plaintext as numbers||0||19||19||0||2||10||0||19||3||0||22||13|
|Keystream as numbers||10||9||2||13||6||12||11||7||24||11||24||20|
|Ciphertext as numbers||10||28||21||13||8||22||11||26||27||11||46||33|
|Ciphertext as numbers
wrapped to 0-25
|Ciphertext as text||k||c||v||n||i||w||l||a||b||l||u||h|
References[change | change source]
- Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Menezes, van Oorschot and Vanstone (2001), chapter 1, 6 and 7.