eSTREAM and the Present State of Stream-cipher Analysis

eSTREAM, a large four-year information security project, is launched by Europe after NESSIE. This paper mainly describes the original demand for stream ciphers in eSTREAM and presents a safety evaluation system. The 34 candidates to the ECRYPT stream cipher project are briefly introduced, also a simple security evaluation of the stream ciphers is proposed. Moreover, two typical attacks on stream cipher, that is, algebraic attack, correlation attack, are discussed. Thus the definition of security is drawn. Finally, the present state and development prospect of stream ciphers is summa- rized and forecasted.