A Hardware Implementation of ZUC-256 Stream Cipher

In this paper, we present a hardware implementation of ZUC-256 stream cipher. ZUC-256 is developed from ZUC-128 to provide higher 256-bit security for 5G communication. The optimized implementation of ZUC-256 uses a five-stage pipeline architecture to shorten the critical path of the cipher. The evaluation results show that this architecture performs better than the other ZUC-128 designs in frequency and throughput, and satisfy the demand of LTE for 5G communication.