Cryptography: Stream Cipher Vs Block Cipher

Block Ciphers vs Stream Ciphers

The below section will illustrate the main advantages and disadvantages of stream and block ciphers.

• Since stream ciphers work bit by bit, stream ciphers are faster than block ciphers.
• Since block cipher work on block of data, so it requires more memory for computation than stream cipher.
• One of the biggest advantage of stream ciphers over block ciphers is that they do not require padding.
• Because block ciphers encrypt a whole block at a time (and furthermore have “feedback” modes which are most recommended), they are more susceptible to noise in transmission, that is if you mess up one part of the data, all the rest is probably unrecoverable. Whereas with stream ciphers are bytes are individually encrypted with not connection to other chunks of data (in most ciphers/modes), and often have support for interruptions on the line.
• stream ciphers do not provide integrity protection or authentication, whereas some block ciphers (depending on mode) can provide integrity protection, in addition to confidentiality.