Crypto-Archaeology: unearthing design methodology of DES s-boxes

University of Calcutta, Institute of Radio Physics and Electronics, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.3285v1
Subject Areas
Algorithms and Analysis of Algorithms, Cryptography
Keywords
Cryptography, Data Encryption Standard, Boolean Functions
Copyright
© 2017 Dey et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Dey S, Ghosh R. 2017. Crypto-Archaeology: unearthing design methodology of DES s-boxes. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3285v1

Abstract

US defence sponsored the DES program in 1974 and released it in 1977. It remained as a well-known and well accepted block cipher until 1998. Thirty-two 4-bit DES S-Boxes are grouped in eight each with four and are put in public domain without any mention of their design methodology. S-Boxes, 4-bit, 8-bit or 32-bit, find a permanent seat in all future block ciphers. In this paper, while looking into the design methodology of DES S-Boxes, we find that S-Boxes have 128 balanced and non-linear Boolean Functions, of which 102 used once, while 13 used twice and 92 of 102 satisfy the Boolean Function-level Strict Avalanche Criterion. All the S-Boxes satisfy the Bit Independence Criterion. Their Differential Cryptanalysis exhibits better results than the Linear Cryptanalysis. However, no S-Boxes satisfy the S-Box-level SAC analyses. It seems that the designer emphasized satisfaction of Boolean-Function-level SAC and S-Box-level BIC and DC, not the S-Box-level LC and SAC.

Author Comment

The work is an original review work on Cryptography and Boolean Functions