Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2015/976

On Reverse-Engineering S-Boxes with Hidden Design Criteria or Structure

Alex Biryukov and Léo Perrin

Abstract: S-Boxes are the key components of many cryptographic primitives and designing them to improve resilience to attacks such as linear or differential cryptanalysis is well understood. In this paper, we investigate techniques that can be used to reverse-engineer S-box design and illustrate those by studying the S-Box $F$ of the Skipjack block cipher whose design process so far remained secret. We first show that the linear properties of $F$ are far from random and propose a design criteria, along with an algorithm which generates S-Boxes very similar to that of Skipjack. Then we consider more general S-box decomposition problems and propose new methods for decomposing S-Boxes built from arithmetic operations or as a Feistel Network of up to 5 rounds. Finally, we develop an S-box generating algorithm which can fix a large number of DDT entries to the values chosen by the designer. We demonstrate this algorithm by embedding images into the visual representation of S-box's DDT.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / S-box design criteria, Skipjack, linearity, functional decomposition problem, efficient implementation

Original Publication (in the same form): IACR-CRYPTO-2015
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-47989-6_6

Date: received 9 Oct 2015

Contact author: leo perrin at uni lu

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20151012:210101 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2015/976

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