Group theory in cryptography

This paper is a guide for the pure mathematician who would like to know more about cryptography based on group theory. The paper gives a brief overview of the subject, and provides pointers to good textbooks, key research papers and recent survey papers in the area.Comment: 25 pages References updated, and a few extra references added. Minor typographical changes. To appear in Proceedings of Groups St Andrews 2009 in Bath, U

Public Key Cryptography based on Semigroup Actions

A generalization of the original Diffie-Hellman key exchange in $(\Z/p\Z)^*$ found a new depth when Miller and Koblitz suggested that such a protocol could be used with the group over an elliptic curve. In this paper, we propose a further vast generalization where abelian semigroups act on finite sets. We define a Diffie-Hellman key exchange in this setting and we illustrate how to build interesting semigroup actions using finite (simple) semirings. The practicality of the proposed extensions rely on the orbit sizes of the semigroup actions and at this point it is an open question how to compute the sizes of these orbits in general and also if there exists a square root attack in general. In Section 2 a concrete practical semigroup action built from simple semirings is presented. It will require further research to analyse this system.Comment: 20 pages. To appear in Advances in Mathematics of Communication