Paper 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).