Optimality of the Width-ww Non-adjacent Form: General Characterisation and the Case of Imaginary Quadratic Bases

Efficient scalar multiplication in Abelian groups (which is an important operation in public key cryptography) can be performed using digital expansions. Apart from rational integer bases (double-and-add algorithm), imaginary quadratic integer bases are of interest for elliptic curve cryptography, because the Frobenius endomorphism fulfils a quadratic equation. One strategy for improving the efficiency is to increase the digit set (at the prize of additional precomputations). A common choice is the width\nbd-$w$ non-adjacent form (\wNAF): each block of $w$ consecutive digits contains at most one non-zero digit. Heuristically, this ensures a low weight, i.e.\ number of non-zero digits, which translates in few costly curve operations. This paper investigates the following question: Is the \wNAF{}-expansion optimal, where optimality means minimising the weight over all possible expansions with the same digit set? The main characterisation of optimality of \wNAF{}s can be formulated in the following more general setting: We consider an Abelian group together with an endomorphism (e.g., multiplication by a base element in a ring) and a finite digit set. We show that each group element has an optimal \wNAF{}-expansion if and only if this is the case for each sum of two expansions of weight 1. This leads both to an algorithmic criterion and to generic answers for various cases. Imaginary quadratic integers of trace at least 3 (in absolute value) have optimal \wNAF{}s for $w\ge 4$. The same holds for the special case of base $(\pm 3\pm\sqrt{-3})/2$ and $w\ge 2$, which corresponds to Koblitz curves in characteristic three. In the case of $\tau=\pm1\pm i$, optimality depends on the parity of $w$. Computational results for small trace are given

Esthetic Numbers and Lifting Restrictions on the Analysis of Summatory Functions of Regular Sequences

When asymptotically analysing the summatory function of a $q$-regular sequence in the sense of Allouche and Shallit, the eigenvalues of the sum of matrices of the linear representation of the sequence determine the "shape" (in particular the growth) of the asymptotic formula. Existing general results for determining the precise behavior (including the Fourier coefficients of the appearing fluctuations) have previously been restricted by a technical condition on these eigenvalues. The aim of this work is to lift these restrictions by providing a insightful proof based on generating functions for the main pseudo Tauberian theorem for all cases simultaneously. (This theorem is the key ingredient for overcoming convergence problems in Mellin--Perron summation in the asymptotic analysis.) One example is discussed in more detail: A precise asymptotic formula for the amount of esthetic numbers in the first~$N$ natural numbers is presented. Prior to this only the asymptotic amount of these numbers with a given digit-length was known.Comment: to appear in "2019 Proceedings of the Sixteenth Meeting on Analytic Algorithmics and Combinatorics (ANALCO)

Automata in SageMath---Combinatorics meet Theoretical Computer Science

The new finite state machine package in the mathematics software system SageMath is presented and illustrated by many examples. Several combinatorial problems, in particular digit problems, are introduced, modeled by automata and transducers and solved using SageMath. In particular, we compute the asymptotic Hamming weight of a non-adjacent-form-like digit expansion, which was not known before

The height of multiple edge plane trees

Multi-edge trees as introduced in a recent paper of Dziemia\'nczuk are plane trees where multiple edges are allowed. We first show that $d$-ary multi-edge trees where the out-degrees are bounded by $d$ are in bijection with classical $d$-ary trees. This allows us to analyse parameters such as the height. The main part of this paper is concerned with multi-edge trees counted by their number of edges. The distribution of the number of vertices as well as the height are analysed asymptotically