Time series characterization by means of applied symbolic dynamics

The relationship between the dynamical systems theory and the principles of cryptography was underlined by Shannon in his seminal work about perfect secrecy. Indeed, it is possible to interpret the main requirements of encryption systems by means of general concepts of dynamical systems theory, as the sensitivity to initial conditions/control parameters and the ergodicity property. However, this relationship could imply security flaws when an attacker can link partial information extracted from the encryption process to a subset of the secret keys of the related cryptosystem. In this work we highlight the outcomes of the applied theory of symbolic dynamics as a tool to detect such a vulnerability.