Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2002/005

Cryptanalysis of Stream Cipher COS (2,128) Mode I

Hongjun Wu and Feng Bao

Abstract: Filiol and Fontaine recently proposed a family of stream ciphers named COS. COS is based on nonlinear feedback shift registers and was claimed to be with high cryptographic strength. Babbage showed that COS $(2,128)$ Mode II is extremely weak. But Babbage's attack is too expensive to break the COS $(2,128)$ Mode I (the complexity is around $2^{52}$). In this paper, we show that the COS $(2,128)$ Mode I is too weak. With about $2^{16}$-bit known plaintext, the secret information could be recovered with small amount of memory and computation time (less than one second on a Pentium IV Processor).

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / stream ciphers, cryptanalysis, COS

Date: received 3 Jan 2002

Contact author: hongjun at krdl org sg

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

Version: 20020104:174247 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2002/005

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