Paper 2017/1055

Cellular Automata Based S-boxes

Luca Mariot, Stjepan Picek, Alberto Leporati, and Domagoj Jakobovic

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 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.

Note: General revision fixing several errors and typos. Structure changed to better reflect the original contributions of the paper and summarize the previous work.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
ellular AutomataS-boxCryptographic propertiesHeuristics
Contact author(s)
luca mariot @ disco unimib it
History
2018-02-17: revised
2017-10-31: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/1055
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/1055,
      author = {Luca Mariot and Stjepan Picek and Alberto Leporati and Domagoj Jakobovic},
      title = {Cellular Automata Based S-boxes},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/1055},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1055}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1055}
}
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