CRIPTOCEL: Design of Cellular Automata Based Cipher Schemes

Abstract: This paper presents CRIPTOCEL, a complex project that aims the development and design of cellular-automata based cryptographic systems. Cryptography is a field of major scientific and technical interest nowadays, mainly because of the increased security demands of different communication systems. Applications of cellular automata in cryptography have already been studied by various authors; the novelty and the main interest in CRIPTOCEL project is the orientation towards the hardware implementation. A special software has been developed for the analysis of different encryption/decryption strategies with cellular automata. Between the various strategies and algorithms studied, the best were selected for hardware implementation. The main issues of cellular automata hardware design are also discussed for the selected cryptosystems. The result is a VLSI project for a fast, cheap, efficient and versatile cryptographic chip