Design and application of an S-box using complete Latin square

Abstract

Since a substitution box (S-box) is the nonlinearity part of a symmetric key encryption scheme, it directly determines the performance and security level of the encryption scheme. Thus, generating S-box with high performance and efficiency is attracting. This paper proposes a novel method to construct S-box using the complete Latin square and chaotic system. First, a complete Latin square is generated using the chaotic sequences produced by a chaotic system. Then an S-box is constructed using the complete Latin square. Performance analyses show that the S-box generated by our proposed method has a high performance and can achieve strong ability to resist many security attacks such as the linear attack, differential attack and so on. To show the efficiency of the constructed S-box, this paper further applies the S-box to image encryption application. Security analyses show that the developed image encryption algorithm is able to encrypt different kinds of images into cipher images with uniformly distributed histograms. Performance evaluations demonstrate that it has a high security level and can outperform several state-of-the-art encryption algorithms.