Evolving side-channel resistant reconfigurable hardware for elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

We propose to use a genetic algorithm to evolve novel reconfigurable hardware to implement elliptic curve cryptographic combinational logic circuits. Elliptic curve cryptography offers high security-level with a short key length making it one of the most popular public-key cryptosystems. Furthermore, there are no known sub-exponential algorithms for solving the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. These advantages render elliptic curve cryptography attractive for incorporating in many future cryptographic applications and protocols. However, elliptic curve cryptography has proven to be vulnerable to non-invasive side-channel analysis attacks such as timing, power, visible light, electromagnetic, and acoustic analysis attacks. In this paper, we use a genetic algorithm to address this vulnerability by evolving combinational logic circuits that correctly implement elliptic curve cryptographic hardware that is also resistant to simple timing and power analysis attacks. Using a fitness function composed of multiple objectives - maximizing correctness, minimizing propagation delays and minimizing circuit size, we can generate correct combinational logic circuits resistant to non-invasive, side channel attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to evolve a cryptography circuit using a genetic algorithm. We implement evolved circuits in hardware on a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA. Results reveal that the evolutionary algorithm can successfully generate correct, and side-channel resistant combinational circuits with negligible propagation delay.