Cellular automata (CA) offer an interesting approach for designing cryptographic primitives, providing complex emergent behaviour for security with massively parallel implementations. This talk surveys the role of CA in symmetric cryptography and secret sharing, tracing the line from Wolfram’s pseudorandom generator and its cryptanalytic weaknesses to rigorous constructions of CA-based stream ciphers, S-boxes, and secret sharing schemes. We also give an overview of how bipermutive CA generate Latin squares and families of mutually orthogonal Latin squares (MOLS), yielding threshold secret sharing schemes. Along this talk, we mention several recent developments in the cryptographic research community that leverage CA-based constructions, and point out several interesting open problems for future research.