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Symmetry
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New Advances in Symmetric Cryptography
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New Advances in Symmetric Cryptography

A special issue of Symmetry (ISSN 2073-8994). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2025 | Viewed by 7268

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Xiaoyang Dong

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Interests: cryptography

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue focuses on the use of fast and secure primitives in symmetric cryptography, including the design and analysis of block ciphers, stream ciphers, encryption schemes, hash functions, message authentication codes, (cryptographic) permutations, authenticated encryption schemes, cryptanalysis, etc.

Dr. Xiaoyang Dong
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Symmetry is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • block cipher
  • stream cipher
  • hash function
  • message authentication codes
  • authenticated encryption
  • cryptanalysis

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

28 pages, 6199 KiB  
Article
Dual Chaotic Diffusion Framework for Multimodal Biometric Security Using Qi Hyperchaotic System
by Tresor Lisungu Oteko and Kingsley A. Ogudo
Symmetry 2025, 17(8), 1231; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym17081231 - 4 Aug 2025
Viewed by 256
Abstract
The proliferation of biometric technology across various domains including user identification, financial services, healthcare, security, law enforcement, and border control introduces convenience in user identity verification while necessitating robust protection mechanisms for sensitive biometric data. While chaos-based encryption systems offer promising solutions, many [...] Read more.
The proliferation of biometric technology across various domains including user identification, financial services, healthcare, security, law enforcement, and border control introduces convenience in user identity verification while necessitating robust protection mechanisms for sensitive biometric data. While chaos-based encryption systems offer promising solutions, many existing chaos-based encryption schemes exhibit inherent shortcomings including deterministic randomness and constrained key spaces, often failing to balance security robustness with computational efficiency. To address this, we propose a novel dual-layer cryptographic framework leveraging a four-dimensional (4D) Qi hyperchaotic system for protecting biometric templates and facilitating secure feature matching operations. The framework implements a two-tier encryption mechanism where each layer independently utilizes a Qi hyperchaotic system to generate unique encryption parameters, ensuring template-specific encryption patterns that enhance resistance against chosen-plaintext attacks. The framework performs dimensional normalization of input biometric templates, followed by image pixel shuffling to permutate pixel positions before applying dual-key encryption using the Qi hyperchaotic system and XOR diffusion operations. Templates remain encrypted in storage, with decryption occurring only during authentication processes, ensuring continuous security while enabling biometric verification. The proposed system’s framework demonstrates exceptional randomness properties, validated through comprehensive NIST Statistical Test Suite analysis, achieving statistical significance across all 15 tests with p-values consistently above 0.01 threshold. Comprehensive security analysis reveals outstanding metrics: entropy values exceeding 7.99 bits, a key space of 10320, negligible correlation coefficients (<10−2), and robust differential attack resistance with an NPCR of 99.60% and a UACI of 33.45%. Empirical evaluation, on standard CASIA Face and Iris databases, demonstrates practical computational efficiency, achieving average encryption times of 0.50913s per user template for 256 × 256 images. Comparative analysis against other state-of-the-art encryption schemes verifies the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed scheme and demonstrates our framework’s superior performance in both security metrics and computational efficiency. Our findings contribute to the advancement of biometric template protection methodologies, offering a balanced performance between security robustness and operational efficiency required in real-world deployment scenarios. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Advances in Symmetric Cryptography)
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22 pages, 2728 KiB  
Article
Hybrid Dynamic Galois Field with Quantum Resilience for Secure IoT Data Management and Transmission in Smart Cities Using Reed–Solomon (RS) Code
by Abdullah Aljuhni, Amer Aljaedi, Adel R. Alharbi, Ahmed Mubaraki and Moahd K. Alghuson
Symmetry 2025, 17(2), 259; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym17020259 - 8 Feb 2025
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1127
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT), which is characteristic of the current industrial revolutions, is the connection of physical devices through different protocols and sensors to share information. Even though the IoT provides revolutionary opportunities, its connection to the current Internet for smart cities [...] Read more.
The Internet of Things (IoT), which is characteristic of the current industrial revolutions, is the connection of physical devices through different protocols and sensors to share information. Even though the IoT provides revolutionary opportunities, its connection to the current Internet for smart cities brings new opportunities for security threats, especially with the appearance of new threats like quantum computing. Current approaches to protect IoT data are not immune to quantum attacks and are not designed to offer the best data management for smart city applications. Thus, post-quantum cryptography (PQC), which is still in its research stage, aims to solve these problems. To this end, this research introduces the Dynamic Galois Reed–Solomon with Quantum Resilience (DGRS-QR) system to improve the secure management and communication of data in IoT smart cities. The data preprocessing includes K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and min–max normalization and then applying the Galois Field Adaptive Expansion (GFAE). Optimization of the quantum-resistant keys is accomplished by applying Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) and Moth Flame Optimization (MFO) algorithms. Also, role-based access control provides strong cloud data security, and quantum resistance is maintained by refreshing keys every five minutes of the active session. For error correction, Reed–Solomon (RS) codes are used which provide data reliability. Data management is performed using an attention-based Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Att-Bi-LSTM) model with skip connections to provide optimized city management. The proposed approach was evaluated using key performance metrics: a key generation time of 2.34 s, encryption time of 4.56 s, decryption time of 3.56 s, PSNR of 33 dB, and SSIM of 0.99. The results show that the proposed system is capable of protecting IoT data from quantum threats while also ensuring optimal data management and processing. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Advances in Symmetric Cryptography)
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18 pages, 951 KiB  
Article
A Ciphertext Reduction Scheme for Garbling an S-Box in an AES Circuit with Minimal Online Time
by Xu Yan, Bin Lian, Yunhao Yang, Xiaotie Wang, Jialin Cui, Xianghong Zhao, Fuqun Wang and Kefei Chen
Symmetry 2024, 16(6), 664; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym16060664 - 28 May 2024
Viewed by 1243
Abstract
The secure computation of symmetric encryption schemes using Yao’s garbled circuits, such as AES, allows two parties, where one holds a plaintext block m and the other holds a key k, to compute Enc(k,m) without [...] Read more.
The secure computation of symmetric encryption schemes using Yao’s garbled circuits, such as AES, allows two parties, where one holds a plaintext block m and the other holds a key k, to compute Enc(k,m) without leaking m and k to one another. Due to its wide application prospects, secure AES computation has received much attention. However, the evaluation of AES circuits using Yao’s garbled circuits incurs substantial communication overhead. To further improve its efficiency, this paper, upon observing the special structures of AES circuits and the symmetries of an S-box, proposes a novel ciphertext reduction scheme for garbling an S-box in the last SubBytes step. Unlike the idea of traditional Yao’s garbled circuits, where the circuit generator uses the input wire labels to encrypt the corresponding output wire labels, our garbling scheme uses the input wire labels of an S-box to encrypt the corresponding “flip bit strings”. This approach leads to a significant performance improvement in our garbling scheme, which necessitates only 28 ciphertexts to garble an S-box and a single invocation of a cryptographic primitive for decryption compared to the best result in previous work that requires 8×28 ciphertexts to garble an S-box and multiple invocations of a cryptographic primitive for decryption. Crucially, the proposed scheme provides a new idea to improve the performance of Yao’s garbled circuits. We analyze the security of the proposed scheme in the semi-honest model and experimentally verify its efficiency. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Advances in Symmetric Cryptography)
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19 pages, 805 KiB  
Article
Algebraic Attacks against Grendel: An Arithmetization-Oriented Primitive with the Legendre Symbol
by Jianqiang Ni, Jianhui Zhang, Gaoli Wang, Rui Li and Yanzhao Shen
Symmetry 2023, 15(8), 1563; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym15081563 - 10 Aug 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1706
Abstract
The rise of modern cryptographic protocols such as Zero-Knowledge proofs and secure Multi-party Computation has led to an increased demand for a new class of symmetric primitives. Unlike traditional platforms such as servers, microcontrollers, and desktop computers, these primitives are designed to be [...] Read more.
The rise of modern cryptographic protocols such as Zero-Knowledge proofs and secure Multi-party Computation has led to an increased demand for a new class of symmetric primitives. Unlike traditional platforms such as servers, microcontrollers, and desktop computers, these primitives are designed to be implemented in arithmetical circuits. In terms of security evaluation, arithmetization-oriented primitives are more complex compared to traditional symmetric cryptographic primitives. The arithmetization-oriented permutation Grendel employs the Legendre Symbol to increase the growth of algebraic degrees in its nonlinear layer. To analyze the security of Grendel thoroughly, it is crucial to investigate its resilience against algebraic attacks. This paper presents a preimage attack on the sponge hash function instantiated with the complete rounds of the Grendel permutation, employing algebraic methods. A technique is introduced that enables the elimination of two complete rounds of substitution permutation networks (SPN) in the sponge hash function without significant additional cost. This method can be combined with univariate root-finding techniques and Gröbner basis attacks to break the number of rounds claimed by the designers. By employing this strategy, our attack achieves a gain of two additional rounds compared to the previous state-of-the-art attack. With no compromise to its security margin, this approach deepens our understanding of the design and analysis of such cryptographic primitives. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Advances in Symmetric Cryptography)
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13 pages, 563 KiB  
Article
Meet-in-the-Middle Differential Fault Analysis on ITUbee Block Cipher
by Yongze Kang, Qingyuan Yu, Lingyue Qin and Guoyan Zhang
Symmetry 2023, 15(6), 1196; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym15061196 - 2 Jun 2023
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1822
Abstract
Differential fault analysis (DFA) was introduced by Biham and Shamir. It is a powerful analysis technique to retrieve the secret key by injecting fault into an internal state and utilizing the differences between the correct ciphertexts and the faulty ciphertexts. Based on the [...] Read more.
Differential fault analysis (DFA) was introduced by Biham and Shamir. It is a powerful analysis technique to retrieve the secret key by injecting fault into an internal state and utilizing the differences between the correct ciphertexts and the faulty ciphertexts. Based on the idea of meet-in-the-middle, some differential characters can help to recover the key of some symmetric ciphers. At CHES 2011, this technique was utilized to give analyses on AES. In this article, we propose several DFA schemes on ITUbee, a software-oriented block symmetric cipher for resource-constrained devices based on the meet-in-the-middle idea. Our attacks are efficient enough and more powerful than previous works. Furthermore, the attacks in this article break the protection countermeasure, meaning we have to review the protection method on devices for ITUbee. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Advances in Symmetric Cryptography)
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