Side-Channel Analysis of Chaos-Based Substitution Box Structures

Abstract

There is a theoretically strong relationship between chaos and cryptology. In practice, one of the most successful applications of this relationship is chaos-based s-box structures. However, the performance metrics of chaos-based s-box designs are worse compared to those for s-box structure based on algebraic techniques used in modern encryption algorithms, such as the AES algorithm. What is the reason for using chaos-based s-box structures, even though they have worse cryptographic characteristics? Researchers claim that they may be an alternative defense against implementation attacks, especially side-channel analyses. However, no studies have supported or refuted this claim so far. In this paper, side-channel analyses have been performed for two different chaos-based s-box structures. These two s-box structures have been selected for having with the best and worst performance measurements for s-box structures previously proposed in the literature. The results were compared with the AES s-box structure. Analysis of the results showed that chaos-based s-box structures are more resistant against side-channel attacks. Therefore, chaos-based designs may be an alternative defense against implementation attacks, as alleged. However, both algebraic and chaos-based s-box designs have been observed to be insecure if the attacker has more than 30 plaintexts in the side channel analyses. These results show that implementation analysis studies are required in the chaos-based cryptology literature.