Speaker: Maneli Noorkami
Title: Fast Correlation Attack via Unequal Error-Protecting LDPC Codes
Date: February 20, 2004
Time: 3:00 pm
Location: GCATT Room 325
Abstract:
One of the most remarkable of all ciphers is the one-time-pad where the
plaintext message is added bit by bit (or in general, character by
character) to a random sequence of the same length. The remarkable fact
about the one-time-pad is its perfect security, but the disadvantage is the
unlimited length of key.The appealing feature of the one-time-pad suggested
building synchronous stream ciphers which encrypt the plaintext by use of a
pseudo-random sequence. This removes the requirement of an unlimited key.
The pseudo-random sequence is controlled by a secret key that is generated
by a deterministic algorithm called the keystream generator.  One method of
generating the keystream is to combine a fixed number of linear feedback
shift register's (LFSR) outputs by means of a nonlinear function. Using the
correlation between the keystream sequence and the output of LFSRs, it is
possible to determine the secret key (initial state of LFSRs). This
cryptanalytic attack is called fast correlation attack.  In a fast correlation
attack, the cryptographic key is recovered from the keystream sequence
using error control coding techniques.  In this seminar, we present an
improved fast correlation attack on stream ciphers. The proposed technique
is based on constructing an unequal error protecting low-density parity-check
code (LDPC) from the LFSR output sequence.  The unequal error protection
allows achieving lower bit-error probability for recovering the secret key
compared to the previous fast correlation attacks.


Biography:


Maneli Noorkami attended Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran
where she earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2001. She received
her M.S. in Electrical Engineering from School of Electical
and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Summer 2003.
There, she conducted resesarch on cryptography. Currently, she is working
towards her Ph.D. in watermarking and information hiding.

Slides: