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

Alex Biryukov; Léo Perrin

Paper 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.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Secret-key cryptography
Publication info: Published by the IACR in CRYPTO 2015
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-47989-6_6
Keywords: S-box design criteria Skipjack linearity functional decomposition problem efficient implementation
Contact author(s): leo perrin @ uni lu
History: 2015-10-12: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2015/976
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/976,
      author = {Alex Biryukov and Léo Perrin},
      title = {On Reverse-Engineering S-Boxes with Hidden Design Criteria or Structure},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/976},
      year = {2015},
      doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-47989-6_6},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/976}
}