The Effect of Mutation Operation on GP- based Stream Ciphers

Design Algorithm

Wasan Shakr Awad

Department of Information Systems, College of Information Technology, University of Bahrain, Sakheer, Bahrain.

Keywords: Genetic Programming, Simulated Annealing, Stream Ciphers, Mutation Operation.

Abstract: Mutation operation is used to introduce a small perturbation in the population from time to time so as to

maintain its diversity. Several mutation operations have been developed for genetic programming. This

paper is to study the impact of mutation operation on the performance of genetic programming. We present

six types of mutation operations that have been applied in the simulated annealing programming (SAP)

algorithm, which is an algorithm used to design stream ciphers using genetic programming and simulated

annealing. Experiments performed to study the effectiveness of these operations in solving the underlying

problem. It has been shown that mutation operation can affect the performance of genetic programming,

especially when it is used to solve complex problems.

1 INTRODUCTION

Evolution is an optimization process, where the aim

is to improve the ability of a system to survive in

dynamically changing environment. There are a

number of evolutionary computation techniques,

such as genetic programming (GP). In GP, the

population individuals are computer programs

represented usually as expression trees (Koza,

1992), and a number of operations are used to

update the population individuals, such as crossover

and mutation.

In general, the inclusion of mutation step the

evolutionary algorithms is very important. The main

aim of mutation operation is to keep certain amount

of randomness and to introduce a small perturbation

in the population from time to time so as to maintain

its diversity. Most of the times the mutation

operation is applied according to some fixed

probabilistic rule. In the past few years mutation

operations based on different probability

distributions (like Normal, Gaussian, and Cauchy

etc) have become popular. Also, in our previous

work (Awad, 2011) adaptive mutation has been

applied and it has been shown its effectiveness

comparable with fixed rate mutation.

Mutation in GP is frequently treated as a

secondary operator. However, it has been shown that

mutation can significantly improve performance

when combined with crossover (Banzhaf , 1996;

Poli, 1997). Few of Koza’s (Koza, 1992; Koza,

1994) early experiments include mutation. Koza

states two reasons for the omission of mutation in

the majority of problems. First, it is rare to lose

diversity when using a sufficient population size;

therefore, mutation is simply not needed in GP.

Second, when the crossover operation occurs using

endpoints in both trees, the effect is very similar to

point mutation. Koza wished to demonstrate that

mutation was not necessary and that GP was not

performing a simple random search. This has

significantly influenced the field, and mutation is

often omitted from GP runs. While mutation is not

necessary for GP to solve many problems, it can

perform as well as crossover based GP in some

cases. O'Reily (O'Reily, 1995) argued that mutation

in combination with simulated annealing or

stochastic iterated hill climbing can perform as well

as crossover-based GP in some cases. Nowadays,

mutation is widely used in GP, especially in solving

complex problems. Koza also advises to use of a low

level of mutation (Koza, 1999). In (Luke, 1997), the

authors suggested that the situation is complex, and

that the relative performance of crossover and

mutation depends on both the problem.

Several mutation operations have been

developed for GP; some of them are listed bellow

(Koza, 1992; Koza, 1994; O'Reily, 1995;

Kinnear,

1994; Angeline

, 1996):

445

Shakr Awad W..

The Effect of Mutation Operation on GP- based Stream Ciphers Design Algorithm.

DOI: 10.5220/0004222804450450

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artiﬁcial Intelligence (ICAART-2013), pages 445-450

ISBN: 978-989-8565-39-6

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

 Subtree mutation replaces a randomly selected

subtree with another randomly created subtree.

 Node replacement mutation (also known as

point mutation) is similar to bit string mutation

in that it randomly changes a point in the

individual. A node in the tree is randomly

selected and randomly changed.

 Hoist mutation creates a new offspring

individual which is copy of a randomly chosen

subtree of the parent. Thus, the offspring will

be smaller than the parent and will have a

different root node.

 Shrink mutation replaces a randomly chosen

subtree with a randomly created terminal.

 Permutation mutation selects a random

function node in a tree and then randomly

permuting its arguments (subtrees).

In addition to these types, two new methods for

implementing the mutation operator in GP called

Semantic Aware Mutation (SAM) and Semantic

Similarity based Mutation (SSM) have been

proposed (

Nguyen, 2009).

Designing good stream cipher automatically is a

complex process, therefore GP has been used in our

previous work (Awad, 2011) for designing one class

of stream cipher systems, and we have showed that

GP can be used successfully to solve this problem.

In (Awad, 2011) GP, integrated with simulated

annealing, (SA) (

Kirkpatrik, 1983) i.e., simulated

annealing programming (SAP), has been used

successfully to design Linear Feedback Shift

the desired properties, such as random keystream,

and large period length. However, we still expect

some improvements. Thus, this paper is to study the

impact of various mutation operations on the

effectiveness of SAP algorithm for designing stream

ciphers.

Six types of mutation operation are applied in this

work, which are:

 GA-Based Terminal Node Mutation

 Random Terminal Node Mutation

 GA-Based Semantic Terminal Node Mutation

 Random Sub-expression Mutation

 GA-based Shrink Mutation

 GA-based Semantic Shrink Mutation

2 SAP ALGORITHM OVERVEIW

SAP is a general automated design approach for

designing stream ciphers that satisfy the desired

properties. It is an integration of GP and SA in order

to work on a population of individuals and to

preserve good individuals into the next generation

(Yuichiro, 2009; Miki, 2007). The output of SAP is

a keystream generator, which is the main component

of stream cipher that generates pseudorandom

Binary sequence (keystream) of length size and

fulfills the security and efficiency requirements.

Stream ciphers (Forouzan, 2008; Rueppel, 1986;

Schneier, 1996; Golomb, 1967) are of great

importance in applications, and there are different

types of stream ciphers, only LFSR-bassed stream

ciphers are considered here, in which, the main

component of the keystream generators is LFSR,

where LFSR is a shift register with linear feedback

function.

The following is the complete SAP algorithm as

described in (Awad, 2011):

Algorithm: SAP

Input : Keystream period length

(size).

Output : LFSR-based keystream

generator.

Begin

Generate the initial population

(pop) randomly;

Evaluate pop;

Temp 250.0; //temperature

Repeat

Generate a new population (pop1) by

applying crossover and mutation;

Evaluate the fitness of the new

generated chromosomes of pop1;

Calculate the averages of fitness

values for pop and pop1, av1 and av2

respectively;

If (av2 > av1) then replace the old

population by the new one, i.e.

pop  pop1;

Else

Begin

e  av1-av2;

Pr  e / Temp;

Generate a random number (rnd);

If (exp(-pr) > rnd) then

pop  pop1;

End;

Temp  Temp * 0.95;

Until (Max Number of generations);

Return the best chromosome of the

last generation;

End.

In SAP algorithm, SA is the technique used for

the construction of the keystream generators. The

structure under adaptation is the set of GP

expressions, and the GA operations are used to

update the population of expressions.

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446

In this algorithm, the genetic operations used are

1-point crossover with probability pc=1.0, and

terminal node mutation with probability pm=0.1.

The mutation operation used to replaces a randomly

selected one gene from a LFSR feedback function

with a new one. The function library includes the

functions: LFSR, XOR, AND, OR. The terminal

nodes are strings of characters (which are converted

to Binary digits during the process of fitness

evaluation) that represent the linear feedback

functions of LFSRs.

For example, the following population individual

(chromosome):

"& SR adfe SR ddeab" is an expression of two

shift registers combined by AND function, and

"adfe" and "ddeab" are feedback functions of the

LFSRs in the expressions.

3 MUTATION OPERATION

DESCRIPTIONS

Different types of mutation operation are applied in

SAP algorithm. The descriptions of theses

operations are given bellow.

3.1 Terminal Node Mutation

This operation randomly changes a point (terminal

node) in the individual. The point is the feedback

function of a LFSR. Three variations of this

operation are considered in this study, as follows.

I. GA-Based Terminal Node Mutation

Here, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to find the

best LFSR feedback function to replace a randomly

selected terminal node (LFSR feedback function) of

an individual. The description of this operation is as

follows.

The population chromosomes in GA are

represented as fixed length Binary strings. The

lengths of these strings are equal to the length of the

randomly selected terminal node S of SAP

individual, where S is the Binary feedback function

of a LFSR. Each chromosome in GA population is a

mask used to modify S, by Xoring GA chromosome

with S. The probability of generating the gene "1" in

the GA initial population is 0.2, while the

probability of the gene "0" is 0.8.

The fitness value is a measurement of the

goodness of the keystream generator, and it is used

to control the application of the operations that

modify a population. The fitness function used in

SAP is also used in GA. After modifying S, the SAP

program is executed to generate the keystream. The

generated keydtream is then evaluated as described

in (Awad, 2011). Eqs. (1), (2), and (3) are used to

evaluate the GA chromosomes. Eq. (1) is used for

the evaluation of keystream randomness using the

frequency and serial tests, in which, nw is the

frequency of w (where w = 00, 01, 10, or 11) in the

generated binary sequence.





size

nwnnf

(1)

There is another randomness requirement which

is: (1/2

* n

) of the runs in the sequence are of

length i, where n

is the number of runs in the

sequence. Thus, we have eq. (2).





















(2)

where M is maximum run length, and n

is the

desired number of runs of length i. Thus, the fitness

function used to evaluate the chromosome x will be

as given by eq. (3), where wt is a constant and size is

the keystream period length:

)(211

)(

xlength

size

xfit 





(3)

The parameters used in this work were set based

on the experimental results, the parameter value that

show the highest performance was chosen to be used

in the implementation of the algorithm. Thus, the

genetic operations used to update the population are

1-point crossover with probability pc=1.0. The

selection strategy, used to select chromosomes for

the genetic operations, is the 2- tournament

selection. The old population is completely replaced

by the new population which is generated from the

old population by applying the genetic operations.

The run of GA is stopped after a fixed number of

generations. The solution is the best chromosome of

the last generation.

II. Random Terminal Node Mutation

Using this operation, S is replaced by randomly

generated LFSR feed back function.

III. GA-Based Semantic Terminal Node Mutation

GA is used to find the best LFSR feed back function,

in term of the big differences in the generated

keystreams, to replace a randomly selected terminal

node (LFSR feed back function) of an individual.

The description of this operation is as follows.

The population chromosomes GA are

represented as fixed length Binary strings. The

TheEffectofMutationOperationonGP-basedStreamCiphersDesignAlgorithm

447

lengths of these strings are equal to the length of the

randomly selected terminal node S of SAP

individual. Each chromosome in GA population

represents the candidate LFSR feedback function to

replace S.

The chromosomes of GA population are

evaluated based on the big difference in the

generated keystreams generated by S and GA

individuals. Thus, eq. (4) used to compute the fitness

value of the GA chromosome x.







size

keystreamkeystreamxfit

)(

(4)

Where keystream

is the ith bit of the keystream

generated by S, and keystream

is the ith bit of the

keystream generated by the LFSR with the GA

chromosome x as feedback function.

The genetic operations used to update the

population are 1-point crossover with probability

pc=1.0. The selection strategy, used to select

chromosomes for the genetic operations, is the 2-

tournament selection. The old population is

completely replaced by the new population which is

generated from the old population by applying the

genetic operations. The run of GA is stopped after a

fixed number of generations.

3.2 Sub-expression Mutation

By applying this operation, a sub-tree is selected

randomly from SAP expression, and then is replaced

by a new sub-expression. In this work, different sub-

expression mutations have been studied. The

following is the description of each one.

I. Random Sub-expression Mutation

Using this operation the sub-expression of SAP

expression is replaced by randomly generated

expression.

II. GA-based Shrink Mutation

This operation is used to reduce the size of SAP

expression, by finding a LFSR that is equivalent to a

randomly selected sub-expression. The root node of

the sub-expression should be any function other than

LFSR. GA is used to find an equivalent LFSR that

generates the same keystream generated by the

selected sub-expression.

The population chromosomes in GA are

represented as variable length Binary strings. Each

chromosome in GA population represents the

candidate LFSR feedback function.

The solution of GA is an equivalent LFSR that

generates the same keystream generated by the sub-

expression selected randomly from a SAP

expression. Thus, Eq. (6) is used to compute the

fitness value of the GA chromosome x.







size

keystreamkeystreamf

(5)

)(

size

xfit





(6)

Where keystream

is the ith bit of the keystream

generated by the sub-expression, and keystream

the ith bit of the keystream generated by the LFSR

with the GA chromosome x as feedback function.

The genetic operations used to update the

population are 1-point crossover with probability

pc=1.0. The selection strategy, used to select

chromosomes for the genetic operations, is the 2-

tournament selection. The old population is

completely replaced by the new population which is

generated from the old population by applying the

genetic operations. The run of GA is stopped after a

fixed number of generations. The solution is the best

chromosome of the last generation.

III. GA-based Semantic Shrink Mutation

It is the similar to previous operation, but GA is used

here to find an equivalent LFSR that generated

different keystream, thus the fitness function used is

given by eq. (4).

4 RESULTS

This section presents the findings and results of the

experiments carried out to demonstrate the impact of

different types of mutation operations on the

effectiveness of SAP algorithm. Therefore, SAP has

been implemented with six types of mutation

operations mentioned above. The six algorithms

have been applied with different mutation rates. The

best algorithms parameters used in the experiments

are:

 Max number of generations of SAP = 30

 Max number of generations of GA = 10

 Pop size of SAP = 100

 Pop size of GA (if used) = 10

The results of applying the six algorithms are

presented in table 1. These results are obtained by

running each algorithm 100 times for different

values of mutation rates. The results of table 1

represent the average of the fitness values of the best

chromosomes in 100 runs. According to the results

and by applying Wilcoxon signed-rank test,

GA-

Based Terminal Node Mutation has been greatly

ICAART2013-InternationalConferenceonAgentsandArtificialIntelligence

448

Table 1: Fitness values averages of 100 runs.

Mutation

Rate%

GA-Based

Terminal

Node

Mutation

Random

Terminal

Node

Mutation

Random

Sub-

expression

Mutation

GA-Based

Semantic

Terminal

Node

Mutation

GA-based

Shrink

Mutation

GA-based

Semantic

Shrink

Mutation

0 31.6738

5 37.3666 30.4139 31.1553 29.4109 24.4812 29.2382

10 43.7615 31.3691 31.4582 33.307 27.5608 29.8604

15 44.2341 31.3691 33.2401 35.4674 26.6744 26.5393

20 44.4663 33.5122 34.5481 35.4996 23.0873 25.3877

30 45.1159 32.8931 35.4401 32.9202 24.6556 23.365

40 47.338 34. 264 35.9812 37.2787 30.7147 25.3943

50 47.452 33.8621 35.5944 38.1934 30.6348 25.9628

60 49.1361 35.3515 36.1849 37.4782 31.3748 26.4893

improved the performance of SAP algorithm; it can

evolve keystream generators that generate

keystreams of good statistical properties and of large

period length. Also, increasing the mutation rate

improves the results. That is because; the feedback

function of LFSR has great effect on the output the

keystream generators. Thus, by using GA to find the

best feedback function can highly improve the

results.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, different types of mutation operations

have been applied in SAP algorithm in order to

study the impact of mutation operation on the

algorithm performance. It has been shown that

mutation operation can affect the performance of

GP, especially when it is used to solve complex

problems, such as designing stream ciphers. Six

mutation operations have been applied. We found

that GA-Based Terminal Node Mutation that

replaces the feedback function of LFSR (terminal

node) by a new feedback function evolved by GA

can highly improve SAP algorithm.

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