A novel efficient substitution-box design based on firefly algorithm and discrete chaotic map

Substitution boxes are essential nonlinear components responsible to impart strong confusion and security in most of modern symmetric ciphers. Constructing efficient S-boxes has been a prominent topic of interest for security experts. With an aim to construct cryptographically efficient S-box, a novel scheme based on firefly (FA) optimization and chaotic map is proposed in this paper. The anticipated approach generates initial S-box using chaotic map. The meta-heuristic FA is applied to find notable configuration of S-box that satisfies the criterions by guided search for near-optimal features by minimizing fitness function. The performance of proposed approach is assessed through well-established criterions such as bijectivity, nonlinearity, strict avalanche criteria, bit independence criteria, differential uniformity, and linear approximation probability. The obtained experimental results are compared with some recently investigated S-boxes to demonstrate that the proposed scheme has better proficiency of constructing efficient S-boxes.