Securing Symmetric Encryption Based on Substitution-Permutation Network Against White-Box Attacks

Summary

This paper proposes a new way to protect substitution-permutation network (SPN) symmetric encryption, such as AES, in the white-box attack context, where adversaries can see the implementation and control the execution platform. The approach adds secret components to lookup tables to expand and substantially change the encryption's internal states, while the ciphertext stays essentially unchanged. The authors report resistance to existing and unknown attacks in security analysis and good performance across platforms in experiments.