A Novel Technique for the Construction of Safe Substitution Boxes Based on Cyclic and Symmetric Groups

Abstract

In the literature, different algebraic techniques have been applied on Galois field GF(28) to construct substitution boxes. In this paper, instead of Galois field GF(28), we use a cyclic group C255 in the formation of proposed substitution box. The construction proposed S-box involves three simple steps. In the first step, we introduce a special type of transformation T of order 255 to generate C255. Next, we adjoin 0 to C255 and write the elements of C255∪0 in 16×16 matrix to destroy the initial sequence 0,1,2,…,255. In the 2nd step, the randomness in the data is increased by applying certain permutations of the symmetric group S16 on rows and columns of the matrix. In the last step we consider the symmetric group S256, and positions of the elements of the matrix obtained in step 2 are changed by its certain permutations to construct the suggested S-box. The strength of our S-box to work against cryptanalysis is checked through various tests. The results are then compared with the famous S-boxes. The comparison shows that the ability of our S-box to create confusion is better than most of the famous S-boxes.