Designing cryptographically strong S-boxes with the use of cellular automata

Abstract

Block ciphers are widely used in modern cryptography. Substitution boxes (S-boxes) are main elements of these types of ciphers. In this paper we propose a new method to create S-boxes, which is based on application of Cellular Automata (CA). We present the results of testing CA-based S-boxes. These results confirm that CA are able to realize efficiently the Boolean function corresponding to classical S-boxes the proposed CA-based S-boxes offer cryptographic properties comparable or better than classical S-box tables.