Abstract
The shrinking generator is a very popular sequence generator with cryptographic applications. Nowadays, it is still considered as a secure keystream generator. In this work, it is shown that the knowledge of only a low number of generated bits is sufficient to break it. Indeed, whereas the linear complexity of the generated sequence (the shrunken sequence) is bounded by A ·2(S − 2) < LC ≤ A ·2(S − 1) (A and S being the lengths of the two component registers), we claim that the generator can be cryptanalyzed with the knowledge of A ·S intercepted bits and simple computations. Such a result is proven thanks to the definition of the shrunken sequences as a particular kind of interleaved sequences. A similar attack can be extended to any other generator of the class of clock-controlled shrinking generators. Furthermore, this paper confirms that certain bits of the interleaved sequences have a greater strategic importance than others, which must be considered as a proof of weakness of interleaved sequence generators regarding their use in cryptography.
This work has been done in the frame of the project HESPERIA (http://www.proyecto-hesperia.org) supported by Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) under programme CENIT and also supported by the companies: Soluziona Consultoría y Tecnología, Unión Fenosa, Tecnobit, Visual-Tools, BrainStorm, SAC and TechnoSafe. The work has also been supported by MEC Project TSI2007-62657.
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Fúster-Sabater, A., Caballero-Gil, P. (2008). Cryptanalytic Attack on Cryptographic Sequence Generators: The Class of Clock-Controlled Shrinking Generators. In: Gervasi, O., Murgante, B., Laganà, A., Taniar, D., Mun, Y., Gavrilova, M.L. (eds) Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2008. ICCSA 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5073. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69848-7_54
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69848-7_54
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