In cryptography

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

, Hermes8 is the name of a stream cypher

Stream cipher

In cryptography, a stream cipher is a symmetric key cipher where plaintext digits are combined with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream . In a stream cipher the plaintext digits are encrypted one at a time, and the transformation of successive digits varies during the encryption...

 algorithm

Algorithm

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning...

 designed by Ulrich Kaiser. It has been submitted to the eSTREAM

ESTREAM

eSTREAM is a project to "identify new stream ciphers suitable for widespread adoption", organised by the EU ECRYPT network. It was set up as a result of the failure of all six stream ciphers submitted to the NESSIE project. The call for primitives was first issued in November 2004. The project was...

 Project of the eCRYPT

ECRYPT

ECRYPT is a 4-year European research initiative launched on 1 February 2004.The stated objective is to, "intensify the collaboration of European researchers in information security, and more in particular in cryptology and digital watermarking.ECRYPT list five core research areas, termed "virtual...

 network. It has been classified as an 'archive' algorithm and will not be further considered.

Security

In the paper "An Analysis of the Hermes8 Stream Ciphers" the authors claim, 'an attack on the latest version of the cipher (Hermes8F), which requires very few known keystream

Keystream

In cryptography, a keystream is a stream of random or pseudorandom characters that are combined with a plaintext message to produce an encrypted message ....

bytes and recovers the cipher's secret key in less than a second on a normal PC'.