International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We apply the algebraic attacks on stream ciphers with memories to the summation generator. For a summation generator that uses $n$ LFSRs, the algebraic equation relating the key stream bits and LFSR output bits can be made to be of degree less than or equal to $2^{\lceil\log_2 n \rceil}$, using $\lceil\log_2 n \rceil + 1$ consecutive key stream bits. This is much lower than the upper bound given by previous general results.