IEEE Access (Jan 2020)

A Novel Method for Generation of Strong Substitution-Boxes Based on Coset Graphs and Symmetric Groups

  • Abdul Razaq,
  • Hanan Alolaiyan,
  • Musheer Ahmad,
  • Muhammad Awais Yousaf,
  • Umer Shuaib,
  • Waqar Aslam,
  • Moatsum Alawida

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2989676
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8
pp. 75473 – 75490

Abstract

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The success of AES encryption standard created challenges for the cryptographers to construct strong substitution-boxes using different underlying approaches. It is because they are solely responsible to decide the robustness of cryptosystem against linear and differential cryptanalyses. With an aim to fulfill the mentioned requirement of robustness, a novel group theoretic and graphical method is proposed to construct S-box with optimal features. Firstly, a strong S-box is generated with the help of orbits of coset graphs and the action of proposed powerful permutation of symmetric group S256. In addition, a specific group is designed the action of whose pairs of permutations has the ability to generate as many as 462422016 strong S-boxes. Few of such proposed S-boxes are reported and assessed against standard performance parameters to validate the effectiveness of proposed findings. The features of proposed S-boxes are compared with most of the recent S-boxes to validate the superior performance. Moreover, they are also applied for image encryption to demonstrate their suitability for multimedia security applications.

Keywords