Linear Cellular Automata as Discrete Models for Generating Cryptographic Sequences

In this paper, we develop a new cellular automata-based linear model for several nonlinear pseudorandom number generators with practical applications in symmetric cryptography. Such a model generates all the solutions of linear binary difference equations as well as many of these solutions are pseudo-random keystream sequences. In this way, a linear structure based on cellular automata may be used to generate not only difference equation solutions but also cryptographic sequences. The proposed model is very simple since it is based exclusively on successive concatenations of a basic linear automaton.