Exploring the cellular automata phenomenology for cryptographic applications

The aim of the research presented in this paper is the development of a high-performance cryptoscheme with Cellular Automata (CA). As the development of cellular automata applications is generally an experimental effort, the research implies the exploration through simulation of the huge space of cellular automata local rules and global states. The experimental criteria of selection for local rules are presented with some examples, for two types of cryptographic schemes. An experimental hardware platform with FPGAs was afterwards use for prototyping the algorithms proposed for encryption and decryption.