Abstract:

Being as unique nonlinear components of block ciphers, substitution boxes (S-boxes) directly affect the security of the cryptographic systems. It is important and difficult to design cryptographically strong S-boxes that simultaneously meet with multiple cryptographic criteria such as bijection, non-linearity, strict avalanche criterion (SAC), bits independence criterion (BIC), differential probability (DP) and linear probability (LP). To deal with this problem, a chaotic S-box based on the artificial bee colony algorithm (CSABC) is designed. It uses the S-boxes generated by the six-dimensional compound hyperchaotic map as the initial individuals and employs ABC to improve their performance. In addition, it considers the nonlinearity and differential uniformity as the fitness functions. A series of experiments have been conducted to compare multiple cryptographic criteria of this algorithm with other algorithms. Simulation results show that the new algorithm has cryptographically strong S-box while meeting multiple cryptographic criteria.