Breaking LFSR using ant colony optimization

Abstract

Ant Colony Optimization is a search meta-heuristic inspired by the behavior of real ant colonies and shown their effectiveness, robustness to solve a wide variety of complex problems. In this paper, we present a novel Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based attack for cryptanalysis of Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR). A known plaintext attack is used to discover the primitive polynomial used in the LFSR. Moreover, our approach allows us to find a linear equivalence of a given key stream through finding the feedback function. Experimental results prove that ACO can be used as an effective tool to break LFSR.