Guest editorial

Discrete structures, sequences and Boolean functions constitute the basic building blocks of stream ciphers, the primary goal of which is to produce pseudo-random sequences of keystream words for cryptographic applications. Over the last decade, the cryptology community has witnessed a huge volume of high-quality research work in the domain of stream ciphers, spearheaded by the eSTREAM project of the European Network of Excellence for Cryptology and the evolution of the security portfolio in modern tele-communication standards. The field of stream ciphers has reached a decent level of maturity over the last few years through the proposal and standardization of several new designs as well as a considerable amount of analysis put forward by eminent academicians. In light of this, we thought that a special issue on “Stream Ciphers” could be of interest to the cryptology community. This is to harness some important research contributions devoted towards stream ciphers into a single literary volume with substantial archival value. We must thank Prof. Claude Carlet, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Cryptography and Communications” for accepting this proposal. For this special issue, we solicited the following in the field of stream ciphers: