A Novel Construction of Efficient Substitution-Boxes Using Cubic Fractional Transformation

• Main Authors: Amjad Hussain Zahid, Muhammad Junaid Arshad, Musheer Ahmad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-03-01
• Series: Entropy
• Subjects: substitution box; cubic fractional transformation; block ciphers; security
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/3/245

A symmetric block cipher employing a substitution–permutation duo is an effective technique for the provision of information security. For substitution, modern block ciphers use one or more substitution boxes (S-Boxes). Certain criteria and design principles are fulfilled and followed for the construction of a good S-Box. In this paper, an innovative technique to construct substitution-boxes using our cubic fractional transformation (CFT) is presented. The cryptographic strength of the proposed S-box is critically evaluated against the state of the art performance criteria of strong S-boxes, including bijection, nonlinearity, bit independence criterion, strict avalanche effect, and linear and differential approximation probabilities. The performance results of the proposed S-Box are compared with recently investigated S-Boxes to prove its cryptographic strength. The simulation and comparison analyses validate that the proposed S-Box construction method has adequate efficacy to generate efficient candidate S-Boxes for usage in block ciphers.