Automated design of a lightweight block cipher with Genetic Programming

In this paper, we present a general framework for the automated design of cryptographic block ciphers by using Genetic Programming. We evolve highly nonlinear and extremely efficient functions that can be used as core components of any cryptographic construction. As an example, a new block cipher named Raiden is proposed. We present a preliminary security analysis of our proposal and a comparison in terms of performance with similar block ciphers such as TEA. The results show that automatically-obtained schemes, such as the one presented here, could be competitive both in security and speed.