A new twist on white-box AES: hide secrets in plain lookup tables
This paper targets a hard deployment reality for symmetric cryptography: white-box settings where attackers can inspect and tamper with the implementation. The authors propose a protection strategy for substitution–permutation network (SPN) ciphers (including AES) that injects additional secret components into lookup tables to expand and substantially alter internal encryption states, while keeping the produced ciphertext essentially unchanged and preserving standard decryption with only simple extra operations. They report security analysis arguing resistance to known and unknown white-box attacks, and experimental results indicating the scheme runs efficiently across platforms—suggesting a potentially more durable building block for real-world white-box encryption deployments.
Why it might matter to you:
If you build or evaluate cryptographic protections for exposed edge/IoT devices, this is a concrete design pattern for hardening SPN implementations when the adversary can see and control the runtime. It also offers a testable research target: verifying whether the “ciphertext unchanged, internals transformed” approach measurably improves robustness under modern white-box threat models.
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