An Improved Fast Correlation Attack on Stream Ciphers

At Crypto’2000, Johansson and Jönsson proposed a fast correlation attack on stream ciphers based on the Goldreich-Rubinfeld-Sudan algorithm. In this paper we show that a combination of their approach with techniques for substituting keystream and evaluating parity-checks gives us the most efficient fast correlation attack known so far. An application of the new algorithm results in the first-known near-practical key recovery attack on the shrinking generator with the parameters suggested by Krawczyk in 1994, which was verified in the 40-bit data LFSR case for which the only previously known efficient attacks were distinguishing attacks.