Structural Analysis of Cryptographic Sequences using Stringology-Based Fingerprinting
For cryptographers evaluating sequence generators, this provides an additional analytical perspective beyond statistical tests, but the results are preliminary and do not demonstrate practical attacks.
This paper introduces a stringology-based fingerprinting (SBF) framework for structural analysis of cryptographic sequences, extracting features like substring frequency and recurrence patterns. Experiments on cipher-generated and random sequences show measurable structural signatures, though no practical weaknesses are identified.
Cryptographic primitives such as stream ciphers,Pseudorandom Number Generators (PRNGs), and block cipher modes produce sequences that are designed to be statistically indistinguishable from random data. As a result, the traditional evaluation techniques therefore rely primarily on statistical randomness tests to assess the quality of generated sequences. While these tests verify global statistical properties, they do not address whether structural characteristics of sequences can reveal information about the underlying generator. In this paper, we introduce a stringology-based fingerprinting, (SBF) framework for the structural analysis of cryptographic sequences. The proposed SBF framework interprets cryptographic outputs as symbolic strings and applies pattern-based feature extraction to capture structural statistics such as substring frequency distributions, recurrence patterns, and entropy characteristics. These structural features are aggregated into fingerprint vectors that characterize sequence generators. The experimental evaluation is conducted using datasets composed of Cipher-Generated Sequences (CGS) and Uniformly Random Sequences (URS). The results demonstrate that stringology-based pattern analysis can reveal measurable structural signatures across different sequence sources. Although these signals do not imply practical cryptographic weaknesses, they provide an additional analytical perspective for evaluating the structural behavior of cryptographic generators.