ALGEBRAIC ATTACKS ON STREAM CIPHERS
Frederik Armknecht · MADOC (University of Mannheim) · 2004
Abstract. Due to their eciency, stream ciphers are widely used in practice (e.g., mobile phones) to ensure the secrecy of transmitted data. Modern cryptographic techniques made it possible to improve their resistance against well known attacks like correlation attacks. Recently, a new kind of attack against stream ciphers came up: algebraic attacks. They proved to be more successful against certain ciphers than all other kind of attacks known before (e.g., against the cipher used in the Bluetooth standard). In this paper we explain algebraic attacks and their enhancements fast algebraic attacks and illustrate them on a toy cipher. 1