Performance evaluation of Grain family and Espresso ciphers for applications on resource constrained devices

Abstract

A secure stream cipher is an effective security solution for applications running on resource-constrained devices. The Grain family of stream ciphers (Grain v1, Grain-128, and Grain-128a) is a family of stream ciphers designed for low-end devices. Similarly, Espresso is a lightweight stream cipher that was developed recently for 5G wireless mobile communication. The randomness of the keystream produced by a stream cipher is a good indicator of its security strength. In this study, we have analyzed the randomness properties of the keystreams produced by both the Grain Family and Espresso ciphers using the statistical packages DieHarder and NIST STS. We also analyzed their performances in two constrained devices (ATmega328P and ESP8266) based on three attainable parameters, namely computation time, memory, and power consumption. Keywords: Stream cipher, Randomness, Dieharder, NIST STS