Stream Ciphers and Number Theory

This book is almost entirely concerned with stream ciphers, concentrating on a particular mathematical model for such ciphers which are called additive natural stream ciphers . These ciphers use a natural sequence generator to produce a periodic keystream. Full definitions of these concepts are given in Chapter 2. This book focuses on keystream sequences which can be analysed using number theory. It turns out that a great deal of information can be deducted about the cryptographic properties of many classes of sequences by applying the terminology and theorems of number theory. These connections can be explicitly made by describing three kinds of bridges between stream ciphering problems and number theory problems. A detailed summary of these ideas is given in the introductory Chapter 1. Many results in the book are new, and over seventy percent of these results described in this book are based on recent research results.