Attacking Bivium Using SAT Solvers

In this paper we present experimental results of an application of SAT solvers in current cryptography. Trivium is a very promising stream cipher candidate in the final phase of the eSTREAM project. We use the fastest industrial SAT solvers to attack a reduced version of Trivium – called Bivium. Our experimental attack time using the SAT solver is the best attack time that we are aware of, it is faster than the following attacks: exhaustive search, a BDD based attack, a graph theoretic approach and an attack based on Gröbner bases. The attack recovers the internal state of the cipher by first setting up an equation system describing the internal state, then transforming it into CNF and then solving it. When one implements this attack, several questions have to be answered and several parameters have to be optimised.