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Finding short and implementation-friendly addition chains with evolutionary algorithms

Journal of Heuristics volume 24, pages 457–481 (2018)Cite this article

Abstract

Finding the shortest addition chain for a given exponent is a significant problem in cryptography. In this work, we present a genetic algorithm with a novel encoding of solutions and new crossover and mutation operators to minimize the length of the addition chains corresponding to a given exponent. We also develop a repair strategy that significantly enhances the performance of our approach. The results are compared with respect to those generated by other metaheuristics for exponents of moderate size, but we also investigate values up to \(2^{255} - 21\). For numbers of such size, we were unable to find any results produced by other metaheuristics which could be used for comparison purposes. Therefore, we decided to add three additional strategies to serve as benchmarks. Our results indicate that the proposed approach is a very promising alternative to deal with this problem. We also consider a more practical perspective by taking into account the implementation cost of the chains: we optimize the addition chains with regards to the type of operations as well as the number of instructions required for the implementation.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported in part by Croatian Science Foundation under the Project IP-2014-09-4882. The second author acknowledges support from CONACyT Project No. 221551. This work was supported in part by the Research Council KU Leuven (C16/15/058) and IOF project EDA-DSE (HB/13/020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KU Leuven, ESAT/COSIC and Imec, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, bus 2452, 3001, Leuven-Heverlee, Belgium

    Stjepan Picek & Nele Mentens

  2. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Stjepan Picek

  3. Department of Computer Science, CINVESTAV-IPN, Av. IPN No. 2508, Col. San Pedro Zacatenco, 07360, Mexico, D.F., Mexico

    Carlos A. Coello Coello

  4. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Domagoj Jakobovic

Authors
  1. Stjepan Picek
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  2. Carlos A. Coello Coello
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  3. Domagoj Jakobovic
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  4. Nele Mentens
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stjepan Picek.

Sage example with the optimal set of squaring instructions

Sage example with the optimal set of squaring instructions

Here we give an example of the inversion built with \(x^{2^1}, x^{2^3}, x^{2^6}, x^{2^9}\) instructions that has in total 9 multiplications operations (18 multiplication instructions) and 20 squaring instructions. The lines beginning with \(\#\) denote comments.

figure e

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Picek, S., Coello, C.A.C., Jakobovic, D. et al. Finding short and implementation-friendly addition chains with evolutionary algorithms. J Heuristics 24, 457–481 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-017-9340-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-017-9340-2

Keywords

  • Addition chains
  • Genetic algorithms
  • Cryptography
  • Optimization
  • Implementation