Paper 4, Section I, 4H4 \mathrm{H}

Coding and Cryptography
Part II, 2013

Describe how a stream cipher works. What is a one-time pad?

A one-time pad is used to send the message x1x2x3x4x5x6y7x_{1} x_{2} x_{3} x_{4} x_{5} x_{6} y_{7} which is encoded as 0101011. In error, it is reused to send the message y0x1x2x3x4x5x6y_{0} x_{1} x_{2} x_{3} x_{4} x_{5} x_{6} which is encoded as 0100010 . Show that there are two possibilities for the substring x1x2x3x4x5x6x_{1} x_{2} x_{3} x_{4} x_{5} x_{6}, and find them.