Abstract
The widespread use of the Internet for transmission of data demands the well-defined data protection algorithms. Symmetric block cipher protects the digital information from the un-authorized recipient. The cryptographic strength of symmetric cipher mainly depends on substitution box (S-box). So the main challenge is to create an S-box with higher value of nonlinearity. Meta-heuristic optimization algorithm has been applied to create a secure S-box. In this paper, a design scheme based on chaotic maps and Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) is proposed to enhance the non-linearity of S-box. Chaotic maps are widely used to create secure S-box due to their aperiodic nature. The proposed idea produced an S-box with non-linearity 109.25, which strengthens the cipher security against linear attacks. The results are compared with the recently created S-boxes and the S-boxes obtained using meta-heuristic algorithms such as Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Firefly algorithm (FA). The obtained S-box is evaluated against cryptographic criteria such as bijectivity, nonlinearity, strict avalanche criteria, bit independence criteria, linear probability and differential probability.