This work is devoted to the design of a substitution box using innovative I-Ching operators,which are evolved from an ancient Chinese philosophy,I-Ching.They are intrication,turnover,and mutual operators.The three operators that inherited from I-Ching are specifically designed to generate substitution boxes in cryptography.In order to analyze these three operators,identity,compositionality,and periodicity measures are developed.Based on the periodicity property of the I-Ching operators,a new network is constructed,thus to applied in the algorithm for designing substitution boxes.To examine the efficiency of our proposed approach,some common used criteria are adopted,such as nonlinearity,strict avalanche criterion,differential approximation probability and linear approximation probability.The comparison results show that substitution boxes designed by applying I-Ching operators have a higher security and better performance compared with other schemes.Furthermore,the proposed approach can also be used to other practice problems in a similar way.