International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Pseudorandom generators, which produce keystreams for stream ciphers by the exclusive-or sum of output bits from alternately clocked linear feedback shift registers, are vulnerable to cryptanalysis. In order to increase their resistance to attacks, we introduce a nonlinear scrambler at the output of these generators. The role of the scrambler plays the nonlinear feedback shift register. In addition, we propose the Modified Alternating Step Generator (MASG1S) built with the nonlinear scrambler and regularly or irregularly clocked linear feedback shift registers with nonlinear filtering functions.