Design of a New Stream Cipher: PALS

TL;DR

The paper introduces PALS, a new clock-controlled stream cipher with enhanced resistance to attacks, high linear complexity, and strong statistical properties, suitable for secure applications like financial cryptography.

Contribution

A novel stream cipher design (PALS) utilizing a unique system-theoretic mechanism for improved security and resistance to conventional cryptanalysis.

Findings

Resistant to correlation, algebraic, divide & conquer, and time-memory tradeoff attacks.

Achieves maximum period and high linear complexity.

Outputs sequences similar to perfect randomness.

Abstract

In this paper, a new stream cipher is designed as a clock-controlled one, but with a new mechanism of altering steps based on system theory in such a way that the structures used in it are resistant to conventional attacks. Our proposed algorithm (PALS) uses the main key with the length of 256 bits and a 32-bit message key. The most important criteria considered in designing the PALS are resistance to known attacks, maximum period, high linear complexity, and good statistical properties. As a result, the output keystream is very similar to the perfectly random sequences and resistant to conventional attacks such as correlation attacks, algebraic attack, divide & conquer attack, time-memory tradeoff attack and AIDA/cube attacks. The base structure of the PALS is a clock-controlled combination generator with memory and we obtained all the features according to design criteria with this structure. PALS can be used in many applications, especially in financial cryptography due to its proper security features