Publication Date
Fri Aug 21 2026
Journal Name
Journal Of Intelligent Decision Making And Information Science
A Key-Dependent Dynamic S-box for the ASCON Lightweight Cipher with a Dual Acceptance Filter and Population-Level Evaluation
ASCON
dynamic S-box
key-dependent substitution
lightweight cryptography
strict avalanche criterion
UAV communication security
population-level analysis.
Communication between unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms and flying ad-hoc networks is critical and challenging since it is over open radio networks and energy, memory and processing budgets are severely constrained. Lightweight cryptography is the solution and ASCON — the NIST standard for lightweight authenticated encryption — has become a popular option for securing UAV links at a fraction of the energy cost of AES. The security of ASCON relies on one nonlinear device — 5-bit substitution box (S-box). However, this S-box is fixed and publicly known, and allows an adversary to precompute the cryptographic properties one time and then reuse them against all the protected traffic, and moreover, it does not meet the strict av
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Publication Date
Fri Sep 25 2026
Journal Name
Chemical Papers