The Shrinking Generator: Some Practical Considerations

The Shrinking Generator, presented at Crypto'93, is a LFSR-based pseudorandom generator suitable for the implementation of additive stream ciphers. It is particularly simple and has attractive security properties. (The reader is referred to [1] for the definition of the generator and its properties). Although the algorithm was originally intended for hardware implementation, here we will focus on some initial results of an experimental software implementation and other practical considerations.