An observation of cryptographic properties of 256 one-dimensional cellular automata rules

Abstract

The robustness of a cryptographic system substantially depends on its underlying elements. Boolean functions are the most frequently used elements in various cryptographic systems, be it block ciphers, stream ciphers and hash functions. However, constructing Boolean functions satisfying all fundamental cryptographic properties are not trivial. We study the cryptographic properties of Boolean functions of biological system namely one-dimensional Cellular Automata (CA) and show that some of its Boolean functions satisfy all mentioned properties on levels very close to optimal and therefore can be recommended as cryptographically strong Boolean function. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.