Cellular Automata in Stream Ciphers

A wide family of nonlinear sequence generators, the so-called clockcontrolled shrinking generators, has been analyzed and identified with a subset of linear cellular automata. The algorithm that converts the given generator into a linear model based on automata is very simple and can be applied in a range of practical interest. Due to the linearity of these automata as well as the characteristics of this class of generators, a cryptanalytic approach can be proposed. Linear cellular structures easily model keystream generators with application in stream cipher cryptography.