Resilience to distinguishing attacks on cipher and their generalizations

The stream cipher is a lightweight variant of the well-known Welch- Gong () stream cipher family, targeted to resource-constrained devices like RFID tags, smart cards, and wireless sensor nodes. Recently, a distinguishing attack was discovered against the stream cipher by Orumiehchiha, Pieprzyk and Steinfeld. In this paper, we extend their work to a general distinguishing attack and suggest criteria to protect the stream cipher family from this attack. Our analysis shows that by properly choosing the minimal polynomial of the linear feedback shift register for a stream cipher, the general distinguishing attack can be easily thwarted.