  In this work, pseudorandom sequence generators based on finite fields have
been analyzed from the point of view of their cryptographic application. In
fact, a class of nonlinear sequence generators has been modelled in terms of
linear cellular automata. The algorithm that converts the given generator into
a linear model based on automata is very simple and is based on the
concatenation of a basic structure. Once the generator has been linearized, a
cryptanalytic attack that exploits the weaknesses of such a model has been
developed. Linear cellular structures easily model sequence generators with
application in stream cipher cryptography.
