Grain

The Grain Family of Stream Ciphers

Grain originally saw the light in 2005 during the eSTREAM project. It is an innovative stream cipher, which is very light in hardware and offers possibilities of increasing the throughput at the cost of extra hardware. Since its appearance, Grain has become one of the most quoted and cryptanalysed stream ciphers.

Grain v1 takes an 80-bit key and a 64-bit IV. The eSTREAM project has information on cryptanalysis and implementations of Grain v1 as well as reference code and other information. The specification is available in the International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2(1), of 2007.

Grain-128 appeared in 2006 and takes a key of 128 bits and a 96-bit IV. The original document is available in the proceedings of ISIT of that year.