cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (cryptography), ...

, Grand Cru is a

block cipher In cryptography, a block cipher is a deterministic algorithm that operates on fixed-length groups of bits, called ''blocks''. Block ciphers are the elementary building blocks of many cryptographic protocols. They are ubiquitous in the storage a ...

invented in 2000 by Johan Borst. It was submitted to the NESSIE project, but was not selected. Grand Cru is a 10-round substitution–permutation network based largely on

Rijndael The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is a variant ...

(or AES). It replaces a number of Rijndael's unkeyed operations with key-dependent ones, in a way consistent with the security purposes of each operation. The intent is to produce a cipher at least as secure as Rijndael, and perhaps much more secure. The block size and

key size In cryptography, key size or key length refers to the number of bits in a key used by a cryptographic algorithm (such as a cipher). Key length defines the upper-bound on an algorithm's security (i.e. a logarithmic measure of the fastest known a ...

are both 128 bits, and the

key schedule In cryptography, the so-called product ciphers are a certain kind of cipher, where the (de-)ciphering of data is typically done as an iteration of '' rounds''. The setup for each round is generally the same, except for round-specific fixed va ...

is the same as Rijndael's. Grand Cru is designed on the principle of ''multiple layered security''. It is equivalent to a chain of 4 subciphers with independent keys, such that if 3 of the keys are known, the remaining cipher should still be secure.

References

{{Cryptography navbox , block Block ciphers