An Evaluation and Enhancement of Seredynski-Bouvry CA-based Encryption Scheme
This work addresses security vulnerabilities in a specific encryption scheme for cryptography applications, representing an incremental enhancement.
The paper evaluated the Seredynski-Bouvry cellular automata-based encryption scheme and found it fails some NIST statistical tests with neighborhood radius less than three, and careless rule selection weakens security. They improved the scheme to satisfy strict avalanche criteria and pass NIST tests in about half the iterations of the original scheme by changing the neighborhood definition.
In this paper, we study a block cipher based on cellular automata, proposed by Seredynski and Bouvry in \cite{semabo04} against \emph{plain-text avalanche criteria} and \emph{randomness} tests. Our experiments shows that Seredynski-Bouvry encryption scheme does not pass some NIST statistical tests by neighborhood radius less than three. It also showed that if the CA rule is selected carelessly, it weaken the security of scheme. Therefor, the selection of CA-rule as part of key can not be left to the user. Hence, cryptographic properties such as balancedness and non-linearity should be considered in the selection of CA-rules. This approach is more compliant with Kerckhoffs principle. So security should depend just on security of final data. We also improve Seredynski-Bouvry encryption scheme to satisfy strict avalanche criteria and NIST statistical test suite in about half number of iterations comparing to original scheme. This improvement is achieved by change in the definition of neighborhood.