The stability theory of stream ciphers (Q1202027)

This monograph under review consists of seven chapters, namely, introduction, stream ciphers, the BAA attacks on several classes of stream ciphers, measure indices on the security of stream ciphers, the stability of linear complexity of sequences, the period stability of sequences, summary and open problems, and two appendices. ``This research report is devoted to a new branch of stream ciphers: the stability theory of stream ciphers. It is mainly based on our research results, which have been obtained since 1987 and were mainly done by the first author.'' wrote the authors. Stream ciphers in this book mean ones in the narrow sense. And the stability problem on stream ciphers reduces to the stability problem on their running-key sequences. Among the others, several key concepts are introduced in this book, that is, weight complexity, sphere complexity, weight period, and sphere period, for a periodic sequence; lower bounds on weight complexities etc. are exploited and many results are given for several kinds of sequences such as binary sequences with period \(2^ n\), \(m\)-sequences, clock-controlled binary sequences, etc.