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Resilience to distinguishing attacks on WG-7 cipher and their generalizations

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Abstract

The stream cipher WG-7 is a lightweight variant of the well-known Welch- Gong (WG) stream cipher family, targeted to resource-constrained devices like RFID tags, smart cards, and wireless sensor nodes. Recently, a distinguishing attack was discovered against the stream cipher WG-7 by Orumiehchiha, Pieprzyk and Steinfeld. In this paper, we extend their work to a general distinguishing attack and suggest criteria to protect the WG stream cipher family from this attack. Our analysis shows that by properly choosing the minimal polynomial of the linear feedback shift register for a WG stream cipher, the general distinguishing attack can be easily thwarted.

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Acknowledgement

The research is supported by NSERC SPG and Discovery Grants.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Guang Gong, Mark Aagaard & Xinxin Fan

Authors
  1. Guang Gong
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  2. Mark Aagaard
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  3. Xinxin Fan
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Correspondence to Xinxin Fan.

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Gong, G., Aagaard, M. & Fan, X. Resilience to distinguishing attacks on WG-7 cipher and their generalizations. Cryptogr. Commun. 5, 277–289 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12095-013-0089-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12095-013-0089-7

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