Abstract
While there is evidence that large substitution boxes (S-boxes) have better cryptographic properties than small S-boxes, they are much harder to design. The difficulty arises from the relative scarcity of suitable boolean functions as the size of the S-box increases. We describe the construction of cryptographically strong 5×5 S-boxes using near-bent boolean functions of five variables. These functions, where the number of variables is odd, possess highly desirable cryptographic properties and can be generated easily and systematically. Moreover, the S-boxes they compose are shown to satisfy all the important design criteria. Further, we feel that it is possible to generalize near-bent functions to any odd number of variables, thereby making construction of yet larger S-boxes feasible.
This work was partially supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
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Detombe, J., Tavares, S. (1993). Constructing large cryptographically strong S-boxes. In: Seberry, J., Zheng, Y. (eds) Advances in Cryptology — AUSCRYPT '92. AUSCRYPT 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 718. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57220-1_60
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57220-1_60
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