Resilience to distinguishing attacks on WG-7 cipher and their generalizations

Abstract

The stream cipher WG-7 is a lightweight variant of the well-known Welch-Gong (WG) stream cipher family, targeting for resource-constrained devices like RFID tags, smart cards, and wireless sensor nodes. Recently, a distinguishing attack was discovered against the stream cipher WG-7 by Orumiehchiha, Pieprzyk and Steinfeld. In this paper, we extend their work to a general distinguishing attack and suggest criteria to protect the WG stream cipher family from this attack. Our analysis shows that by properly choosing the minimal polynomial of the linear feedback shift register for a WG stream cipher, the general distinguishing attack can be easily thwarted.

An Efficient Stream Cipher WG-16 and its Application for Securing 4G-LTE Networks

“…Therefore, the stream cipher WG-16 is resistant to the distinguishing attack. In [11], Gong et Discrete Fourier Transform Attack. The Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) attack is a new type of attack to recover the internal state of a filtering generator, which was first proposed by Ronjom and Helleseth in [18] and extended to attacking filtering generators over 2 n F by Gong et al in [12].…”