Title: Designing substitution boxes for secure ciphers

Authors: Nadia Nedjah, Luiza de Macedo Mourelle

Addresses: Faculty of Engineering, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. ' Faculty of Engineering, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract: In cryptography, a Substitution box (S-box) constitutes a cornerstone component of symmetric key algorithms. In block ciphers, they are typically used to obscure the relationship between the plaintext and the ciphertext. It is well-known that the more linear and the less auto-correlated the S-box is, the more resilient the cryptosystem that uses them. However, engineering a regular S-box that has the highest non-linearity and lowest auto-correlation properties is an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we exploit evolutionary computation to engineer regular S-boxes that present high non-linearity and low auto-correlation properties.

Keywords: substitution boxes; S-box; Nash equilibrium; symmetric key algorithms; cryptography; secure ciphers; substitution box design; evolutionary computing; genetic algorithms.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICA.2007.013404

International Journal of Innovative Computing and Applications, 2007 Vol.1 No.1, pp.86 - 91

Published online: 25 Apr 2007 *

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