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+++ title = "Learn by Implementing Elliptic Curve Crypto" date = 2022-03-03 tags = ["crypto", "learn-by-implementing"] draft = true math = true toc = 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
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 a
custom 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
- Signatures
- Diffie Hellman
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"
)
You can run this blog post using Markout:
markout -l go content/posts/2022-03-03-learn-by-implementing-elliptic-curve-crypto.md > /tmp/ecc.go go run /tmp/ecc.go
Math primitives
type CurveParams struct {
P *big.Int
}
Cryptographic applications
These are some of the cryptographic primitives you can build over the above implementation.