Reflection ciphers

Christina Boura, Anne Canteaut, Lars R. Knudsen, Gregor Leander
2015 Designs, Codes and Cryptography  
This paper investigates ciphers where the set of encryption functions is identical to the set of decryption functions, which we call reflection ciphers. Equivalently, there exists a permutation P , named the coupling permutation, such that decryption under k corresponds to encryption under P (k). We show that this coupling permutation must be an involution without fixed points. Special care has to be taken of some related-key distinguishers since, in the context of reflection ciphers, they may
more » ... rovide attacks in the single-key setting. We then derive some criteria for constructing secure reflection ciphers and analyze the security properties of different families of coupling permutations. In particular, we show that, for affine coupling permutations, the resistance to relatedkey distinguishers is given by some trade-off between the dimension and the covering-radius of some linear codes. Finally, as an illustration, we provide new variants of the block cipher PRINCE with key schedules corresponding to several coupling permutations.
doi:10.1007/s10623-015-0143-x fatcat:anvmhignkjcmrppn7s5exwcumu