A Survey of Metaheuristic Algorithms for the Design of Cryptographic Boolean Functions

TL;DR

This survey reviews 25 years of metaheuristic algorithms used to design cryptographic Boolean functions, introducing a new taxonomy and discussing future research directions.

Contribution

It is the first comprehensive survey on metaheuristic methods for cryptographic Boolean functions, providing a new taxonomy and analysis of past works.

Findings

Metaheuristics are widely used in cryptographic Boolean function design.

Various metaheuristic algorithms have been applied with differing success.

Future research directions include improving algorithm efficiency and exploring new metaheuristic techniques.

Abstract

Boolean functions are mathematical objects used in diverse domains and have been actively researched for several decades already. One domain where Boolean functions play an important role is cryptography. There, the plethora of settings one should consider and cryptographic properties that need to be fulfilled makes the search for new Boolean functions still a very active domain. There are several options to construct appropriate Boolean functions: algebraic constructions, random search, and metaheuristics. In this work, we concentrate on metaheuristic approaches and examine the related works appearing in the last 25 years. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey work on this topic. Additionally, we provide a new taxonomy of related works and discuss the results obtained. Finally, we finish this survey with potential future research directions.