A simple linearization of the self-shrinking generator by means of cellular automata

Abstract

In this work, it is shown that the output sequence of a well-known cryptographic generator, the so-called self-shrinking generator, can be obtained from a simple linear model based on cellular automata. In fact, such a cellular model is a linear version of a nonlinear keystream generator currently used in stream ciphers. The linearization procedure is immediate and is based on the concatenation of a basic structure. The obtained cellular automata can be easily implemented with FPGA logic. Linearity and symmetry properties in such automata can be advantageously exploited for the analysis and/or cryptanalysis of this particular type of sequence generator.