title: A New Cost Function for Evolution of S-Boxes.
abstract: Substitution Boxes (S-Boxes) play an important role in many modern-day cryptographic algorithms, more commonly known as ciphers. Without carefully chosen S-Boxes, such ciphers would be easier to break. Therefore, it is not surprising that the design of suitable S-Boxes attracts a lot of attention in the cryptography community. The evolutionary computation (EC) community also had several attempts using evolutionary paradigms to evolve S-Boxes with good cryptographic properties. This article focuses on a fitness function one should use when evolving highly nonlinear S-Boxes. After an extensive experimental analysis of the current state-of-the-art fitness functions, we present a new one that offers higher speed and better results when compared with the aforementioned fitness functions.
authors.affiliation: KU Leuven, ESAT/COSIC and iMinds, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, bus 2452, B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee, Belgium and LAGA, UMR 7539, CNRS, University of Paris 8, France stjepan@computer.org.
authors.forename: Stjepan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Picek
authors.affiliation: KU Leuven, ESAT/COSIC and iMinds, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, bus 2452, B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee, Belgium and LAGA, UMR 7539, CNRS, University of Paris 8, France stjepan@computer.org.
authors.forename: Marko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cupic
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia leon.rotim@fer.hr.
authors.forename: Leon
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Rotim
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005075:Biological Evolution; D016494:Computer Security; D003198:Computer Simulation; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics
keywords: Evolutionary algorithms; S-Boxes; cryptography; fitness function; solution representation.