A Cryptosystem Based on the Composition of Reversible Cellular Automata

We present conditions which guarantee that a composition of marker cellular automata has the same neighbourhood as each of the individual components. We show that, under certain technical assumptions, a marker cellular automaton has a unique inverse with a given neighbourhood. We use these results to develop a working key generation algorithm for a public-key cryptosystem based on reversible cellular automata originally conceived by Kari. We conclude with a discussion on security and practical considerations for the cryptosystem and give several ideas for future work.