The Study of Randomness Properties Exhibited by LAO-3D Lightweight Block Cipher Algorithm

The paper presents the randomness analysis of LAO-3D algorithm. LAO-3D is a lightweight block cipher that is developed using the 3D permutation method. It consists of 64 bits block and 128 bits key sizes that executes in 20 encryption rounds of the substitution–permutation network structure. Lightweight cryptographic algorithms are specifically tailored for devices with limited resources that include small embedded systems, IoT devices, or low-power microcontrollers. These devices often have limited processing power, memory, energy, and inherent security limitations. The presence of randomness helps to ensure that cryptographic operations can be performed efficiently within these constraints, minimizing the computational overhead and energy consumption, and further helps to strengthen the security of these algorithms by adding an extra layer of uncertainty, making it harder for attackers to exploit the limited resources and predictable behaviors of lightweight devices. In performing the randomness testing, fifteen statistical tests from the NIST Statistical Test Suite were used. 1000 samples were produced from the algorithm by adopting nine different data categories. The analysis results indicate that LAO-3D passed all of the statistical tests, and this tested algorithm is random according to the 0.1% significance level.