Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2003/014

Hiji-bij-bij: A New Stream Cipher with a Self-Synchronizing Mode of Operation

Palash Sarkar

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new stream cipher called Hiji-bij-bij (HBB). The basic design principle of HBB is to mix a linear and a nonlinear map. Our innovation is in the design of the linear and the nonlinear maps. The linear map is realised using two 256-bit maximal period 90/150 cellular automata. The nonlinear map is simple and consists of several alternating linear and nonlinear layers. We prove that the mixing achieved by the nonlinear map is complete and the maximum bias in any non-zero linear combination of the input and output bits of the nonlinear map is at most $2^{-13}$. We also identify a self-synchronizing mode ({\bf SS}) of operation for HBB. The performance of HBB is reasonably good in software and is expected to be very fast in hardware. To the best of our knowledge, a generic exhaustive search seems to be the only method of attacking the cipher.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / stream cipher, nonlinear map, cellular automata

Date: received 23 Jan 2003, last revised 17 Sep 2003

Contact author: palash at isical ac in

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

Note: This is an updated version of the cipher. Also software implementations are available at the following website.

http://www.isical.ac.in/~palash/HBB/HBB.html

Version: 20030917:074323 (All versions of this report)

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