Re: stream ciphers and realtime communications?

Stream ciphers are very efficient in hardware encryption applications, but suck eggs in software. They have been the workhorse of military cryptography for at least 40 years, but those are all hardware applications. If you are working in software, it is much easier to deal with data in 64-bit blocks than in individual bits. The Shrinking Generator, which has only two LFSRs, is slower than DES in software. You need to iterate the Shrinking Generator 64 times to encrypt the data that DES handles in just one iteration. Bruce