  The dynamical system described herein uses a hybrid cellular automata (CA)
mechanism to attain reversibility, and this approach is adapted to create a
novel block cipher algorithm called HCA. CA are widely used for modeling
complex systems and employ an inherently parallel model. Therefore,
applications derived from CA have a tendency to fit very well in the current
computational paradigm where scalability and multi-threading potential are
quite desirable characteristics. HCA model has recently received a patent by
the Brazilian agency INPI. Several evaluations and analyses performed on the
model are presented here, such as theoretical discussions related to its
reversibility and an analysis based on graph theory, which reduces HCA security
to the well-known Hamiltonian cycle problem that belongs to the NP-complete
class. Finally, the cryptographic robustness of HCA is empirically evaluated
through several tests, including avalanche property compliance and the NIST
randomness suite.
