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Modification of Ultra Lightweight AES with dynamic S-Box using Square Polynominal Transformation and Permutation

artificial-intelligence
cryptography
embedded-computing
security-and-privacy
internet-of-things

Abstract

Ultra-Lightweight AES (UL–AES) is a reduced version of AES designed for resource-constrained environments such as IoT, but its static S-Box design results in weak diffusion and limited resistance against cryptanalysis. This study proposes a modification of UL–AES by integrating a dynamic S-Box generated through the Square Polynomial Transformation and Permutation (SPTP) method to enhance security without compromising efficiency. The proposed 4 × 4 dynamic S-Box was evaluated against seven criteria: bijectivity, nonlinearity, Strict Avalanche Criterion (SAC), Bit Independence Criterion (BIC), Linear Approximation Probability (LAP), differential uniformity, and algebraic resistance. The results show that the S-Box always preserves bijectivity, achieves a nonlinearity of 4 comparable to PRESENT, LED, RECTANGLE, TWINE, and SKINNY, and satisfies SAC with 51.56% (∆ = 1.56%), indicating near-ideal diffusion. The BIC analysis produced an average correlation of 0.000, while LAP reached 0.75, slightly above the recommended 0.625 but still competitive with LED (0.6875) and RECTANGLE (0.6875), and significantly better than UL–AES (1.000). Performance analysis further confirmed the efficiency of the proposed scheme with low memory usage (10.45 KB) and competitive execution times. Overall, the integration of an SPTP-based dynamic S-Box into UL–AES successfully balances security and efficiency, making it a strong candidate for lightweight cryptographic applications in IoT, with future work focusing on hardware implementations and side-channel resistance.
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