Attack against stream cipher (LFSR with ASCII)

RARA

9/15/23, 4:12 PM

I'm reading Understanding Cryptography by Christof Paar and Jan Pelzl. In chapter 2 (Stream Ciphers) there's a question that goes like this:

Assume we have a stream cipher whose period is quite short. We happen to know that the period is 150–200 bit in length. We assume that we do not know anything else about the internals of the stream cipher. In particular, we should not assume that it is a simple LFSR. For simplicity, assume that English text in ASCII format is being encrypted.

Describe in detail how such a cipher can be attacked. Specify exactly what Oscar has to know in terms of plaintext/ciphertext, and how he can decrypt all ciphertext.

I'm assuming that a Known-Plaintext attack would work for this particular scenario. So, the attacker would have to know some plaintext. My question is could the plain-text be derived by performing LFA (Letter Frequency Analysis)? Since the question assume that English text in ASCII format is being encrypted ? If not how can the attacker guess some of the plaintext ?

Or if Known-Plaintext is an infeasible attack what other attack could be feasible ?

0 + 0

cryptanalysis

stream-cipher

known-plaintext-attack

lfsr

kelalaka

9/15/23, 9:11 PM

If the period is small then you have some form of the Vigenere cipher.

Maarten Bodewes

9/18/23, 2:48 PM

I'm guessing that the question assumes that XOR is used for creating the ciphertext, and that it is as such not plaintext aware.

RARA

9/18/23, 8:32 PM

@MaartenBodewes that's what I assumed.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Attack against stream cipher (LFSR with ASCII)

TH: Attack against stream cipher (LFSR with ASCII)

RO: Attack against stream cipher (LFSR with ASCII)

RU: Attack against stream cipher (LFSR with ASCII)

VI: Attack against stream cipher (LFSR with ASCII)

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