Title: Grain: a stream cipher for constrained environments

Authors: Martin Hell, Thomas Johansson, Willi Meier

Addresses: Department of Information Technology, Lund University, P.O. Box 118, Lund 221 00, Sweden. ' Department of Information Technology, Lund University, P.O. Box 118, Lund 221 00, Sweden. ' FHNW, Windisch CH-5210, Switzerland

Abstract: A new stream cipher, Grain, is proposed. The design targets hardware environments where gate count, power consumption and memory is very limited. It is based on two shift registers and a non-linear output function. The cipher has the additional feature that the speed can be increased at the expense of extra hardware. The key size is 80 bits and no attack faster than exhaustive key search has been identified. The hardware complexity and throughput compares favourably to other hardware oriented stream ciphers like E0 and A5/1.

Keywords: stream ciphers; hardware efficient; constrained environments; linear feedback shift register; nonlinear filters; computer security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2007.013798

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2007 Vol.2 No.1, pp.86 - 93

Published online: 28 May 2007 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article