LAO-3D: A Symmetric Lightweight Block Cipher Based on 3D Permutation for Mobile Encryption Application

Data transmissions between smartphone users require security solutions to protect communications. Hence, encryption is an important tool that must be associated with smartphones to keep the user’s data safe. One proven solution to enhance the security of encryption algorithms is by using 3D designs on symmetric block ciphers. Although a 3D cipher design could improve the algorithms, the existing methods enlarge the block sizes that will also expand the key sizes and encryption rounds, thus decreasing their efficiency. Therefore, we propose the LAO-3D block cipher using a 3D permutation that offers security by providing confusion and diffusion characteristics. Five security analyses were conducted to assess the strengths of LAO-3D. The findings suggest that LAO-3D achieves better results compared to other existing lightweight block ciphers, with 98.2% non-linearity, 50% bit error rates for both plaintext and key modifications, surpasses 100% of the randomness test, and is immune to differential and linear cryptanalysis attacks. Moreover, the block cipher obtains competitive performance results in software applications. From the security analyses and performance tests, it is proven that LAO-3D can provide sufficient security at low costs in mobile encryption applications.