Block Ciphers Substitution Box Generation Based on Natural Randomness in Underwater Acoustics and Knights Tour Chain

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for generating S-boxes for block ciphers using true randomness derived from underwater acoustic waves and a Knights Tour chain, enhancing cryptographic strength.

Contribution

It presents the first use of underwater acoustic natural randomness combined with Knights Tour chains for dynamic S-box generation, satisfying all standard evaluation criteria.

Findings

Underwater sound waves provide high-quality true randomness.

Generated S-boxes outperform or match recent published S-boxes in strength.

The method successfully passes all standard S-box evaluation tests.

Abstract

The protection of confidential information is a global issue and block encryption algorithms are the most reliable option. The famous information theorist, Claude Shannon has given two desirable characteristics that should exist in a strong cipher which are substitution and permutation in their fundamental research on Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems. block ciphers strictly follow the substitution and permutation principle to generate a ciphertext. The actual strength of the block ciphers against several attacks is entirely based on its substitution characteristic, which is gained by using the S-Box. In the current literature, algebraic structure-based and chaos-based techniques are highly used for the construction of S-boxes because both these techniques have favourable features for S-box construction, but also various attacks of these techniques have been identified. True randomness has been universally recognized as the ideal method for cipher primitives design because true random numbers are unpredictable, irreversible, and unreproducible. The basic concept of the proposed technique is the extraction of true random bits from underwater acoustic waves and to design a novel technique for the dynamic generation of S-boxes using the chain of knights tour. The proposed method satisfies all standard evaluation tests of S-boxes construction and true random numbers generation. Two million bits have been analyzed using the NIST randomness test suite, and the results show that underwater sound waves are an impeccable entropy source for true randomness. Additionally, our dynamically generated S-boxes have better or equal strength, over the latest published S-boxes (2020 to 2021). According to our knowledge first time, this type of research has been done, in which natural randomness of underwater acoustic waves has been used for the construction of block cipher's S-Box