On the use of expansion series for stream ciphers

Abstract

From power series expansions of functions on curves over finite fields, one can obtain sequences with perfect or almost perfect linear complexity profile. It has been suggested by various authors to use such sequences as key streams for stream ciphers. In this work, we show how long parts of such sequences can be computed efficiently from short ones. Such sequences should therefore considered to be cryptographically weak. Our attack leads in a natural way to a new measure of the complexity of sequences which we call expansion complexity.