Improvements in the randomness and security of digital currency using the photon sponge hash function through Maiorana–McFarland S-box replacement

Abstract

Abstract There is a demand for a digital currency that facilitates remote trading over the Internet and strives to reduce external control, ensuring that transactions are conducted only between authorized persons or parties involved in the transfer. The financial sector has been significantly impacted by cryptocurrency, or digital currency, which brings new potential and challenges. The concept of digital currency is thoroughly examined, as are its complicated implications on various aspects of the economy. Trading digital currencies via the Internet may be vulnerable to theft and forgery due to the development of hacker programs. Therefore, we proposed to design a new digital currency and then built a 16 × 16 structure and filled the matrix with random numbers within GF(251). We used the random algorithm (Chun–Hui He’s iteration), then generated four directions, and used polynomial equations for the purpose of distributing powers between the parties in our future complete system. The original matrix was encoded with the photon sponge hash function after updating the S box by integrating the algorithms (Chun–Hui He’s iteration, Mariorana–McFarland method), and the results were good security measures (correlation coefficient, bijective property, balanced criteria, completeness criteria, and strict avalanche criteria) as well as the encryption and decryption time became faster (0.0005202). The major objective is to design a new digital currency system toward achieving security, scalability, and comprehensive adoption, looking into how it might improve security, promote financial inclusion, and change the present payment systems.