Breaking the F-FCSR-H stream cipher in real time

Abstract

The F-FCSR stream cipher family has been presented a few years ago. Apart from some flaws in the initial propositions, corrected in a later stage, there are no known weaknesses of the core of these algorithms. The hardware oriented version, called FCSR-H, is one of the ciphers selected for the eSTREAM portfolio. In this paper we present a new and severe cryptanalytic attack on the F-FCSR stream cipher family. We give the details of the attack when applied on F-FCSR-H. The attack requires a few Mbytes of received sequence and the complexity is low enough to allow the attack to be performed on a single PC within seconds. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.