blog/src/content/posts/2022-03-04-learn-by-implementing-elliptic-curve-crypto.md

title	date	tags	draft	math	toc
Learn by Implementing Elliptic Curve Crypto	2022-03-04	crypto learn-by-implementing	true	true	true

Good places to start (in terms of usefulness):

• A relatively easy to understand primer on elliptic curve cryptography by Cloudflare
• Elliptic-curve cryptography from Practical Cryptography
• Elliptic-curve cryptography on Wikipedia
• Elliptic Curve Cryptography: a gentle introduction by Andrea Corbellini

I'm writing this post because there's a lot of good posts out there introducing the elliptic curve formula, but not many that continue with getting from there to actually encrypting and decrypting messages. Maybe this is a good thing for discouraging people from writing insecure ECC implementations and using them in production, but it's not great for understanding the algorithm.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a cryptographer! This is not a cryptographically secure implementation, only used to demonstrate how the algorithm works. Read the SafeCurves intro for some of the attacks a custom ECC implementation may overlook.

Basic Ideas

ECC starts with the idea that starting with an elliptic curve formula like $y^2 = x^3 + ax + b$ that operates over a finite field \mathbb{F}_p, and defining an addition operation over two points, you can form a cyclic structure where adding a point to itself some number of times gets you back where you started.

The interesting thing about this cyclic structure is that given the starting point G, also called the generator and some number n, you can find the $n$th element of that cycle n \times G really quickly (in \log(n) time). But if you're only given G and n \times G, you can't figure out what n is unless you brute force every possible number n could be.

What cryptographers have done is develop several sets of curve parameters that are publicly known, that include a, b, and the generator point G. Then users of the curve will just pick some n and publish n \times G, and because of the difficulty of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, n will remain secret.

There's some constraints on the properties of the curve parameters and G, but I won't go too far into that here since the proven curves have satisfies all those constraints.

Once we have the curve and a keypair, there's all sorts of different cryptographic schemes that we can now build on top of these foundations:

• [Encryption]({{< ref "#encryption" >}})
• [Signatures]({{< ref "#signatures" >}})
• [Key exchange]({{< ref "#key-exchange" >}})

Implementation

I'll be implementing this using Go. I chose it for the ability to define methods out of order and independently of their associated structs, as well as their built-in big-integers library. This is required for compiling the Go module:

package elliptic
import (
  "math/big"
)

This is a literate document. You can run this blog post using Markout:

TODO:

Math primitives

type Point struct {
  x *big.Int
  y *big.Int
  inf bool
}

Addition on P and Q is defined by first finding the line PQ, determining the point -R where it intersects the curve again, and then returning R. We can find the line PQ by using high school geometry:

$$ \begin{aligned} (y - y_0) = m(x - x_0) \end{aligned}

func (A Point) Add(B Point) Point {
  // Find the slope between points A and B.
  slope := big.NewRat(A.y - B.y, A.x - B.x)
  return Point{}
}

Cryptographic applications

These are some of the cryptographic primitives you can build over the above implementation.

Encryption

Signatures

Key exchange