Algebraic attacks on two kinds of special nonlinear filter generators

This letter proposes algebraic attacks on two kinds of nonlinear filter generators with symmetric Boolean functions as the filter fimctions. Different fxom the classical algebraic attacks, the proposed attacks take the advantage of the combinational property of a linear feedback shift register （LFSR） and the symmetric Boolean function to obtain a tow-degree algebraic relation, and hence the complexities of the proposed attacks are independent of the algebraic immunity （AI） of the filter functions. It is shown that improper combining of the LFSR with the filter function can make the filter generator suffer from algebraic attacks. As a result, the bits of the LFSR must be selected properly to input the filter function with large AI in order to withstand the proposed algebraic attacks.