A Discrete Particle Swarm Optimizer for the Design of Cryptographic Boolean Functions

A Particle Swarm Optimizer for the search of balanced Boolean functions with good cryptographic properties is proposed in this paper. The algorithm is a modified version of the permutation PSO by Hu, Eberhart and Shi which preserves the Hamming weight of the particles positions, coupled with the Hill Climbing method devised by Millan, Clark and Dawson to improve the nonlinearity and deviation from correlation immunity of Boolean functions. The parameters for the PSO velocity equation are tuned by means of two meta-optimization techniques, namely Local Unimodal Sampling (LUS) and Continuous Genetic Algorithms (CGA), finding that CGA produces better results. Using the CGA-evolved parameters, the PSO algorithm is then run on the spaces of Boolean functions from n=7 to n=12 variables. The results of the experiments are reported, observing that this new PSO algorithm generates Boolean functions featuring similar or better combinations of nonlinearity, correlation immunity and propagation criterion with respect to the ones obtained by other optimization methods.