Paper 2017/851

How to Use Metaheuristics for Design of Symmetric-Key Primitives

Ivica Nikolić

Abstract

The ultimate goal of designing a symmetric-key cryptographic primitive often can be formulated as an optimization problem. So far, these problems mainly have been solved with trivial algorithms such as brute force or random search. We show that a more advanced and equally versatile class of search algorithms, called metaheuristics, can help to tackle optimization problems related to design of symmetric-key primitives. We use two nature-inspired metaheuristics, simulated annealing and genetic algorithm, to optimize in terms of security the components of two recent cryptographic designs, SKINNY and AES-round based constructions. The positive outputs of the optimization suggest that metaheuristics are non-trivial tools, well suited for automatic design of primitives.

Note: Added link to GitHub that contains Python implementation of the results.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Published by the IACR in ASIACRYPT 2017
Keywords
Metaheuristicsimulated annealinggenetic algorithmautomatic toolcryptographic primitive
Contact author(s)
cube444 @ gmail com
History
2017-12-20: revised
2017-09-09: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/851
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/851,
      author = {Ivica Nikolić},
      title = {How to Use  Metaheuristics for Design of Symmetric-Key Primitives},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/851},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/851}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/851}
}
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