Seminar, 6th March 2001


Speaker:
Bill Chambers, Kings College London

Date:
Tuesday 6th March 2001 at 16:15

Place:
Room TP4, Computer Laboratory

Title:
EMBEDDING ATTACKS ON CLOCK-CONTROLLED SEQUENCE GENERATORS


I shall describe a number of attacks proposed recently on simple binary clock-controlled sequence generators, where one linear-feedback shift register determines the clocking of another shift register which produces the output. (The connection polynomials are assumed known.) In particular I shall consider the step[1..D] generator, the shrinking generator, and the closely related alternating-step generator. The basic idea is to find out where and with what frequency or probability the output binary sequence can be embedded in the sequence produced by the clock-controlled shift register. After describing methods for finding the most likely places for the embedding, I then examine ways of finding 'a posteriori' probabilities for the bits in the clocking sequence, and hence making possible fast correlation attacks on the control shift register.


Seminar, 6th March 2001 / Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk
Last updated: 5th March 2001