Design and Analysis of Substitution Boxes in GOST Lightweight Security Algorithm

Abstract

Recently, lightweight symmetric cryptography became one of the most vital topics for researchers in cryptology. It is introduced as a smart solution to protect the data communication in constraint resources environments. S-boxes play a very vital role in the security of the modern block ciphers. They form the only non-linear element of a block cipher. ‎Therefore, S-boxes have to be chosen carefully to make the ‎cipher rigid against all kinds of attacks. Specially, the compact S-boxes that have been selected to be used in limited resources devices. ‎So, it is essential to understand some of the design criteria that the S-box must satisfy. In lightweight designs, 4-bit S-boxes are preferred to save the area (Gate Equivalents). In this paper, we in our primary analysis, we consider two versions of the GOST algorithm S-Boxes to be tested and evaluated. The Central Bank of the Russian ‎Federation Version and the Most Recent Version are ‎introduced. ‎GOST is one of the most famous modern symmetric ‎block ciphers. The paper looks into the design details of both GOST versions and considers different analysis criteria to their S-Boxes. Our design guarantees that the resulting S-boxes will be ‎bijective and nonlinear and will exhibit the strict avalanche ‎criterion and the output bit independence criterion. ‎In addition, the paper evaluates GOST high resistivity against both linear and differential cryptanalysis.