A Key Selected S-Box Mechanism and Its Investigation in Modern Block Cipher Design

The block cipher is an important means to provide data confidentiality in reality, and the S-box is an essential part in most of modern block cipher designs. In 1973, Feistel used a key selected S-box mechanism in his early block cipher designs, whose idea is to let each S-box have two different states and use a key bit to select which of the two states is to be used in an encryption or decryption operation. However, this key selected S-box mechanism has not got much attention in modern block cipher design with the DES block cipher published in 1977. In this paper, we revisit Feistel’s key selected S-box mechanism, give a generalised version of Feistel’s key selected S-box mechanism, compare it with existing close notions, and design the LBC example cipher to demonstrate that the generalised key selected S-box mechanism can be advantageous over the ordinary S-box mechanism in modern block cipher design for improving security and/or performance without intensifying computational effort and space in some application environments.