Wheedham: An Automatically Designed Block Cipher by means of Genetic Programming

In this work, we present a general scheme for the design of block ciphers by means of genetic programming. In this vein, we try to evolve highly nonlinear and efficient functions to be used for the key expansion and the F-function of a Feistel network. Following this scheme, we propose a new block cipher design called Wheedham, that operates on 512 bit blocks and keys of 256 bits, of which we offer its C code (directly translated from the GP Trees) and some preliminary security results.

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