A Simple Attack on Some Clock-Controlled Generators

We present a new approach to edit distance attacks on certain clock-controlled generators, which applies basic concepts of Graph Theory to simplify the search trees of the original attacks in such a way that only the most promising branches are analyzed. In particular, the proposed improvement is based on cut sets defined on some graphs so that certain shortest paths provide the edit distances. The strongest aspects of the proposal are that the obtained results from the attack are absolutely deterministic, and that many inconsistent initial states of the target registers are recognized beforehand and avoided during search

On Binary de Bruijn Sequences from LFSRs with Arbitrary Characteristic Polynomials

We propose a construction of de Bruijn sequences by the cycle joining method from linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) with arbitrary characteristic polynomial $f(x)$. We study in detail the cycle structure of the set $\Omega(f(x))$ that contains all sequences produced by a specific LFSR on distinct inputs and provide a fast way to find a state of each cycle. This leads to an efficient algorithm to find all conjugate pairs between any two cycles, yielding the adjacency graph. The approach is practical to generate a large class of de Bruijn sequences up to order $n \approx 20$. Many previously proposed constructions of de Bruijn sequences are shown to be special cases of our construction