Generalization of the Self-Shrinking Generator in the Galois Field GF(pn)

Abstract

The proposed by Meier and Staffelbach Self-Shrinking Generator (SSG) which has efficient hardware implementation only with a single Linear Feedback Shift Register is suitable for low-cost and fast stream cipher applications. In this paper we generalize the idea of the SSG for arbitrary Galois Field GF(pn). The proposed variant of the SSG is called the p-ary Generalized Self-Shrinking Generator (pGSSG). We suggest a method for transformation of a non-binary self-shrunken pGSSG sequence into balanced binary sequence. We prove that the keystreams of the pGSSG have large period and good statistical properties. The analysis of the experimental results shows that the pGSSG sequences have good randomness properties. We examine the complexity of exhaustive search and entropy attacks of the pGSSG. We show that the pGSSG is more secure than SSG and Modified SSG against these attacks. We prove that the complexity of the used pGSSG attacks increases with increasing the prime p. Previously mentioned properties give the reason to say that the pGSSG satisfy the basic security requirements for a stream chipper and can be useful as a part of modern stream ciphers.