Highly dispersive substitution box (S-box) design using chaos

Abstract

Highly dispersive S-boxes are desirable in cryptosystems as nonlinear confusion sub-layers for resisting modern attacks. For a near optimal cryptosystem resistant to modern cryptanalysis, a highly nonlinear and low differential probability (DP) value is required. We propose a method based on a piecewise linear chaotic map (PWLCM) with optimization conditions. Thus, the linear propagation of information in a cryptosystem appearing as a high DP during differential cryptanalysis of an S-box is minimized. While mapping from the chaotic trajectory to integer domain, a randomness test is performed that justifies the nonlinear behavior of the highly dispersive and nonlinear chaotic S-box. The proposed scheme is vetted using well-established cryptographic performance criteria. The proposed S-box meets the cryptographic performance criteria and further minimizes the differential propagation justified by the low DP value. The suitability of the proposed S-box is also tested using an image encryption algorithm. Results show that the proposed S-box as a confusion component entails a high level of security and improves resistance against all known attacks.