Cellular automata have the advantage of being amenable to the use of highly parallel and distributed system configurations, and, therefore, have attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years, most notably S. Wolfram.

This paper studies the possibility of producing a set of rules for cellular automata that will generate pseudorandom number sequences of very high statistical quality, which can in turn be used to construct a secret-key cryptosystem that is resistant to attack. A set of eight such rules is selected, and the results of experiments on them are presented, showing that they indeed produce sequences of the desired quality.