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Cellular automata based S-boxes

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Abstract

Cellular Automata (CA) represent an interesting approach to design Substitution Boxes (S-boxes) having good cryptographic properties and low implementation costs. From the cryptographic perspective, up to now there have been only ad-hoc studies about specific kinds of CA, the best known example being the \(\chi \) nonlinear transformation used in Keccak. In this paper, we undertake a systematic investigation of the cryptographic properties of S-boxes defined by CA, proving some upper bounds on their nonlinearity and differential uniformity. Next, we extend some previous published results about the construction of CA-based S-boxes by means of a heuristic technique, namely Genetic Programming (GP). In particular, we propose a “reverse engineering” method based on De Bruijn graphs to determine whether a specific S-box is expressible through a single CA rule. Then, we use GP to assess if some CA-based S-box with optimal cryptographic properties can be described by a smaller CA. The results show that GP is able to find much smaller CA rules defining the same reference S-boxes up to the size \(7\times 7\), suggesting that our method could be used to find more efficient representations of CA-based S-boxes for hardware implementations. Finally, we classify up to affine equivalence all \(3\times 3\) and \(4\times 4\) CA-based S-boxes.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported in part by Croatian Science Foundation under the project IP-2014-09-4882.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DISCo, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Viale Sarca 336/14, 20126, Milano, Italy

    Luca Mariot & Alberto Leporati

  2. Cyber Security Research Group, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 2, Delft, The Netherlands

    Stjepan Picek

  3. Université Paris XIII, LAGA, UMR 7539, Saint-Denis Cedex, France

    Stjepan Picek

  4. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Unska 3, 10000, Zagreb, Croatia

    Domagoj Jakobovic

Authors
  1. Luca Mariot
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  2. Stjepan Picek
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  3. Alberto Leporati
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  4. Domagoj Jakobovic
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luca Mariot.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Special Issue on Boolean Functions and Their Applications

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Mariot, L., Picek, S., Leporati, A. et al. Cellular automata based S-boxes. Cryptogr. Commun. 11, 41–62 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12095-018-0311-8

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