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European Conference on Genetic Programming

EuroGP 2015: Genetic Programming pp 192–204Cite as

Evolutionary Methods for the Construction of Cryptographic Boolean Functions

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9025))

Abstract

Boolean functions represent an important primitive when constructing many stream ciphers. Since they are often the only nonlinear element of such ciphers, without them the algorithm would be trivial to break. Therefore, it is not surprising there exist a substantial body of work on the methods of constructing Boolean functions. Among those methods, evolutionary computation (EC) techniques play a significant role. Previous works show it is possible to use EC methods to generate high-quality Boolean functions that even surpass those built by algebraic constructions. However, up to now, there was no work investigating the use of Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) for producing Boolean functions suitable for cryptography. In this paper we compare Genetic Programming (GP) and CGP algorithms in order to reach the conclusion which algorithm is better suited to evolve Boolean functions suitable for cryptographic usage. Our experiments show that CGP performs much better than the GP when the goal is obtaining as high as possible nonlinearity. Our results indicate that CGP should be further tested with different fitness objectives in order to check the boundaries of its performance.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Technology Foundation STW (project 12624 - SIDES), The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO (project ProFIL 628.001.007) and the ICT COST action IC1204 TRUDEVICE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Stjepan Picek & Domagoj Jakobovic

  2. Department of Electronics, University of York, York, UK

    Julian F. Miller

  3. Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Stjepan Picek, Elena Marchiori & Lejla Batina

Authors
  1. Stjepan Picek
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  2. Domagoj Jakobovic
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  3. Julian F. Miller
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  4. Elena Marchiori
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  5. Lejla Batina
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Domagoj Jakobovic .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Penousal Machado

  2. Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Malcolm I. Heywood

  3. University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    James McDermott

  4. Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

    Mauro Castelli

  5. Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

    Pablo García-Sánchez

  6. Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Paolo Burelli

  7. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Sebastian Risi

  8. Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Kevin Sim

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Picek, S., Jakobovic, D., Miller, J.F., Marchiori, E., Batina, L. (2015). Evolutionary Methods for the Construction of Cryptographic Boolean Functions. In: Machado, P., et al. Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9025. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16501-1_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16501-1_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16500-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16501-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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