Researchers reveal Cryptocode Generator in Chrome

A system that automatically generates optimized cryptography code has been revealed as in use in Google Chrome. The details were revealed at the recent IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy by MIT researchers.

The crytography is being used to keep the communication between the browser and the website being viewed secure. Until recently, the mathematical algorithms used to carry out the cryptography was being written and rewritten by hand.

Researchers from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) designed “Fiat Cryptography,” a system that automatically generates and simultaneously verifies optimized cryptographic algorithms for all hardware platforms. The code created matches the performance of the best handwritten code, but is much faster. 

Their researchers looked at existing implementations of handwritten ECC algorithms in C and assembly languages, and transferred those techniques into their code library. This generated a list of best-performing algorithms for each architecture.

The project then used a compiler that has been mathematically verified with a proofing tool called Coq. Once verified, the library hen simulates each algorithm and selects the best-performing one for each chip architecture.  The cryptographic algorithms being optimized are elliptical curve cryptography (ECC).

These generate keys of various sizes by choosing numerical points at random along a numbered curved line on a graph. Because the processing chips can’t store such large numbers in one place, they are briefly split into smaller digits that are stored on registers. The way the split is made has different performance consequences, and is so complex that the developers writing ECC algorithms manually implement the bit-splitting decisions in their code. In their work, the MIT researchers made use of those human decisions to automatically generate a library of optimized ECC algorithms for any hardware.

The researchers equipped their Coq-based compiler with partial evaluation optimization to precompute all the bit-splitting methods. When matching them to a given chip architecture, it can then immediately discard all algorithms that won’t work for that architecture, so reducing the time it takes to search the library.

From that, the researchers put together a library of the best ways to split ECC algorithms for different chip architectures.

The  automatically generated code is being used in Google’s BoringSSL, an open-source cryptographic library that’s a fork of OpenSSL. Google Chrome, Android apps, and other programs use BoringSSL to generate the keys and certificates used to encrypt and decrypt data.

According to the researchers, about 90 percent of secure Chrome communications currently run their code. The next goal is to find ways to make the compiler run even faster in searching for optimized algorithms.

More Information

• Paper On Fiat Cryptography
• BoringSSL On GitHub

Credit: i-Programmer

Last updated on April 1st, 2023