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

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 8; pp. 75473 - 75490
• Main Authors: Razaq, Abdul, Alolaiyan, Hanan, Ahmad, Musheer, Yousaf, Muhammad Awais, Shuaib, Umer, Aslam, Waqar, Alawida, Moatsum
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: block ciphers; Boxes; Ciphers; coset graphs; Cryptography; Encryption; Graphical methods; Graphs; Group theory; Mathematics; modular symmetric group; Multimedia; Permutations; Robustness; Substitutes; Substitution-boxes
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2989676

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 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">S_{256} </tex-math></inline-formula>. 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.