Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2001/106

Cryptanalysis of the COS (2,128) Stream Ciphers

Steve Babbage

Abstract: A new family of very fast stream ciphers called COS (for “crossing over system”) has been proposed by Filiol and Fontaine, and seems to have been adopted for at least one commercial standard. COS(2,128) Mode I and COS(2,128) Mode II are particular members of this family for which the authors proposed a cryptanalysis challenge. The ciphers accept secret keys of 256, 192 or 128 bits. In this note we cryptanalyse both of these ciphers, using a small amount of known keystream — with negligible effort in the case of Mode II, and with effort well below that required for a single DES key search in the case of Mode I.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / COS, stream cipher, nonlinear feedback shift register, cryptanalysis

Date: received 10 Dec 2001

Contact author: steve babbage at vodafone com

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20011211:191326 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2001/106

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