UNIVERSITY OF PRIMORSKA

FAMNIT

SUBJECT: Symmetric-key cryptography

1st Midterm, 8th of April 2020

This is an open book exam. You can use any literature/source you want.

Each of the 4 exercises is worth 25 points.

1. Synchronous/asynchronous ciphers
• What are the main differences between synchronous and asyn-
chronous stream ciphers? Explain them.
• Describe at least one case when the synchronous cipher is a
better decision, and explain why.
• Describe at least one case when the asynchronous cipher is a
better decision, and explain why.
2. Let 1 + x + x2 + x4 be a connection polynomial, and let the initial state
of the corresponding LFSR be 0111.
• Draw the corresponding LFSR. What is the period of the LFSR?
Is the connecting polynomial primitive? Write the first 10 output
bits.
• Give an example of an LFSR (connecting polynomial and initial
state) with period 127.
• Give an example of an LFSR with length 21. Describe the con-
struction.
3. Correlation attacks
• Describe the main idea of the correlation attack. What kind of
properties does it try to exploit? Give an example.
• How are the correlation attack and the Berlekamp-Massey algo-
rithm related? Suppose the MB algorithm can effectively analyse
a given LFSR cipher. What does that potentially imply for cor-
relation attack?
 • Give an example of a Boolean function on n variables with order
of resiliency n − 1.

4. The outputs of 3 LFSR x1 , x2 and x3 are combined using nonlinear

functions
f (x1 , x2 , x3 ) = x1 x2 + x1 x3
and
g(x1 , x2 , x3 ) = x1 + x2 + x2 x3 .

• What are some important statistical properties of Boolean func-

tions and why?
• Which one of the output sequences is better with respect to sta-
tistical properties and why?