CRIPTOCEL: design of cellular automata based cipher schemes

The paper presents CRIPTOCEL, a complex project that is aimed at 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. The novelty and the main interest in the CRIPTOCEL project is the orientation towards a hardware implementation. A special software has been developed for the analysis of different encryption/decryption strategies with cellular automata. Among 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.