Statistical analysis of S-Box in Rijndael-AES algorithm and formulation of an enhanced S-Box

• Main Authors: Bakhtiari, Majid M., Gaithuru, Juliet N.
• Format: Article
• Published: Mirlabs, USA 2014
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Online Access: http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/59950/; https://www.mirlabs.net/jias/secured/Volume9-Issue4/Paper23.pdf
• Institution: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

The internet is widely used to support services ranging from education, medicine, entertainment to e-commerce. Cryptography helps to safeguard this transmitted information using authentication, digital signatures and encryption algorithms. In this paper we focus on AES, a symmetric block cipher algorithm which implements the Rijndael algorithm. We present a statistical analysis of the Rijndael-AES S-Box so as to evaluate the weaknesses present in the S-Box. These tests evaluate susceptibility of the AES S-Box to algebraic and statistical attacks. Using the obtained results, a technique of formulating a more non-linear S-Box is suggested. This technique uses the incursive congruential method, which produces highly non-linear output with a lower degree of correlation than the current AES S-Box.