English

A New Guess-and-Determine Attack on the A5/1 Stream Cipher

Cryptography and Security 2012-05-04 v2

Abstract

In Europe and North America, the most widely used stream cipher to ensure privacy and confidentiality of conversations in GSM mobile phones is the A5/1. In this paper, we present a new attack on the A5/1 stream cipher with an average time complexity of 2^(48.5), which is much less than the brute-force attack with a complexity of 2^(64). The attack has a 100% success rate and requires about 5.65GB storage. We provide a detailed description of our new attack along with its implementation and results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1204.4535,
  title  = {A New Guess-and-Determine Attack on the A5/1 Stream Cipher},
  author = {Jay Shah and Ayan Mahalanobis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.4535},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:52:26.977Z