Open AccessA secure key dependent dynamic substitution method for symmetric cryptosystems
Author(s) -
Aisha Ejaz,
Ijaz Ali Shoukat,
Umer Iqbal,
Abdul Rauf,
Afshan Kanwal
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
peerj. computer science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.927
H-Index - 70
ISSN - 2376-5992
DOI - 10.7717/peerj-cs.587
Subject(s) - block cipher , substitution (logic) , s box , computer science , symmetric key algorithm , key (lock) , randomness , cryptosystem , linear cryptanalysis , block size , block (permutation group theory) , cryptography , nist , differential cryptanalysis , key size , hamming distance , algorithm , hamming code , encryption , public key cryptography , mathematics , computer security , statistics , block code , geometry , decoding methods , programming language , natural language processing
The biggest challenge for symmetric cryptosystems is to replace their static substitution with dynamic substitution, because static substitution S-boxes make the symmetric block ciphers more vulnerable to attacks. Previous well-known dynamic key-dependent S-boxes are lacking in dynamicity and do not provide optimal security for symmetric block ciphers. Therefore, this research aims to contribute an effective and secure method for designing key-dependent dynamic S-box with dynamic permutations to make the symmetric block ciphers optimally secure. The proposed S-box method has been experimentally evaluated through several measures such as bit independence criteria, non-linearity, hamming distance, balanced output, strict avalanche criteria including differential and linear approximation probabilities. Moreover, the randomness properties of proposed method have also been evaluated through several standard statistical tests as recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Thus, the results show that the proposed method, not only retains effective randomness properties but it also contains, good avalanche effect (up to 62.32%) which is significantly improved than others. Therefore, the proposed substitution method is highly sensitive to the secret key because, only a single bit change in key generates an entirely new S-box with all 256 values at different positions. Thus, the overall evaluation shows that the proposed substitution method is optimally secure and outperforming as compared to the existing S-box techniques. In future, the proposed method can be extended for different key sizes (192–256 bits) or even more.