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Is there a usable implementation of the eSTREAM stream cyphers available for Linux?

I was thinking to use that for encrypting data stored on tape drives, using it with tar.

Now, there are some basic implementations in the eSTREAM suite, but they're designed for benchmarking purposes, and are not very usable for every-day use.

I rely on stream cipher RC4 right now (openssl rc4), but as with DES and AES, I'd like to switch to something more secure, and more modern.

In case there are "better" ways of using encryption on tape drives, please let me know. Block ciphers are obviously not really handy here, since those require random access.

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Quite a few stream ciphers are based on block ciphers, your last sentence doesn't really make sense. – Mat Sep 25 '11 at 13:56
@Mat: Those aren't stream ciphers per se. Those are block ciphers, that work on small blocks and turn them into a functional stream cipher (ECB, CBC, CFB, OFB, etc). I could use a modified block cipher, but when using tape drives, those small blocks might still be too large and cause the tape to stop and change direction a lot. – polemon Sep 25 '11 at 14:54
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That's just not correct. The fact that the block cipher operates on small blocks doesn't have anything to do with how you stream the data to or from the tape. As long as the algo+mode of operation can keep up with the tape drive, you can use a block-cipher based stream cipher just as well as you can use a "native" stream cipher. – Mat Sep 25 '11 at 14:56
There is a reason to use designed stream ciphers. RC4 has been used for a reason for so long. – polemon Sep 25 '11 at 15:01
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Look at for example, the LTO format. The official encryption method they standardized on is AES in GCM mode. Do you really think that if block-based ciphers were somehow inappropriate for tape use, they'd have used one? Tape drives work with large, to very large buffers. Whether your cipher is block-based or "pure" stream is irrelevant. – Mat Sep 25 '11 at 15:36
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