Evolving Cryptographic Boolean Functions with Reaction Systems

Designing bent Boolean functions for cryptographic applications is a challenging combinatorial task due to the super-exponential growth of the search space. We propose Evolutionary Boolean Reaction Systems (EvoBRS), an optimization method based on Reaction Systems (RS)—a bio-inspired model abstracting biochemical reactions. EvoBRS finds functions with competitive nonlinearity while providing a compact and interpretable representation. Unlike traditional methods such as Genetic Algorithms (GA), which rely on full truth tables, EvoBRS leverages a more expressive yet concise encoding.