Cryptography and number theory in the classroom -- Contribution of cryptography to mathematics teaching

Cryptography fascinates people of all generations and is increasingly presented as an example for the relevance and application of the mathematical sciences. Indeed, many principles of modern cryptography can be described at a secondary school level. In this context, the mathematical background is often only sparingly shown. In the worst case, giving mathematics this character of a tool reduces the application of mathematical insights to the message ”cryptography contains math”. This paper examines the question as to what else cryptography can offer to mathematics education. Using the RSA cryptosystem and related content, specific mathematical competencies are highlighted that complement standard teaching, can be taught with cryptography as an example, and extend and deepen key mathematical concepts

Oblivious transfer for secure communication

Over the past four decades, computational power and algorithmic strategies have advanced tremendously resulting in an enormous increase in the key sizes required for secure cryptosystems such as RSA. At the same time, the electronic devices have grown smaller and portable requiring algorithms running on them to be optimized in size and efficiency while providing security, at least, equivalent to that provided on a typical desktop computer. As a result, the industry is moving towards newer cryptosystems such as ECC and NTRU that are well suited for resource constrained environments. While, ECC claims to provide security equivalent to that of RSA for a fraction of key size, NTRU is inherently suited for embedded systems technology. However, implementation of new cryptosystems requires the development of protocols analogous to those developed using older cryptosystems. In this thesis, we fulfill a part of this requirement by providing protocols for Oblivious Transfer using ECC and NTRU. Oblivious Transfer, in turn, has applications in simultaneous contract signing, digital certified mail, simultaneous exchange of secrets, secure multiparty computations, private information retrieval, etc. Furthermore, we introduce the idea of basing Oblivious Transfer on public-key exchange protocols. The presentation in the thesis uses Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, but the scheme is generalizable to any cryptosystem that has a public-key exchange strategy. In fact, our proposal may especially be suited for Quantum Cryptography where the security of key exchange protocols has been proven

On the security of digital signature schemes based on error-correcting codes

We discuss the security of digital signature schemes based on error-correcting codes. Several attacks to the Xinmei scheme are surveyed, and some reasons given to explain why the Xinmei scheme failed, such as the linearity of the signature and the redundancy of public keys. Another weakness is found in the Alabbadi-Wicker scheme, which results in a universal forgery attack against it. This attack shows that the Alabbadi-Wicker scheme fails to implement the necessary property of a digital signature scheme: it is infeasible to find a false signature algorithm D from the public verification algorithm E such that E(D*(m)) = m for all messages m. Further analysis shows that this new weakness also applies to the Xinmei scheme

Generalized Implicit Factorization Problem

The Implicit Factorization Problem was first introduced by May and Ritzenhofen at PKC'09. This problem aims to factorize two RSA moduli $N_1=p_1q_1$ and $N_2=p_2q_2$ when their prime factors share a certain number of least significant bits (LSBs). They proposed a lattice-based algorithm to tackle this problem and extended it to cover $k>2$ RSA moduli. Since then, several variations of the Implicit Factorization Problem have been studied, including the cases where $p_1$ and $p_2$ share some most significant bits (MSBs), middle bits, or both MSBs and LSBs at the same position. In this paper, we explore a more general case of the Implicit Factorization Problem, where the shared bits are located at different and unknown positions for different primes. We propose a lattice-based algorithm and analyze its efficiency under certain conditions. We also present experimental results to support our analysis

A New Cryptosystem Based On Hidden Order Groups

Let $G_1$ be a cyclic multiplicative group of order $n$. It is known that the Diffie-Hellman problem is random self-reducible in $G_1$ with respect to a fixed generator $g$ if $\phi(n)$ is known. That is, given $g, g^x\in G_1$ and having oracle access to a `Diffie-Hellman Problem' solver with fixed generator $g$, it is possible to compute $g^{1/x} \in G_1$ in polynomial time (see theorem 3.2). On the other hand, it is not known if such a reduction exists when $\phi(n)$ is unknown (see conjuncture 3.1). We exploit this ``gap'' to construct a cryptosystem based on hidden order groups and present a practical implementation of a novel cryptographic primitive called an \emph{Oracle Strong Associative One-Way Function} (O-SAOWF). O-SAOWFs have applications in multiparty protocols. We demonstrate this by presenting a key agreement protocol for dynamic ad-hoc groups.Comment: removed examples for multiparty key agreement and join protocols, since they are redundan

Partial key exposure attacks on multi-power RSA

Tezin basılısı İstanbul Şehir Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi'ndedir.In this thesis, our main focus is a type of cryptanalysis of a variant of RSA, namely multi-power RSA. In multi-power RSA, the modulus is chosen as N = prq, where r ≥ 2. Building on Coppersmith’s method of finding small roots of polynomials, Boneh and Durfee show a very crucial result (a small private exponent attack) for standard RSA. According to this study, N = pq can be factored in polynomial time in log N when d < N 0.292 . In 2014, Sarkar improve the existing small private exponent attacks on multi-power RSA for r ≤ 5. He shows that one can factor N in polynomial time in log N if d < N 0.395 for r = 2 . Extending the ideas in Sarkar’s work, we develop a new partial key exposure attack on multi-power RSA. Prior knowledge of least significant bits (LSBs) of the private exponent d is required to realize this attack. Our result is a generalization of Sarkar’s result, and his result can be seen as a corollary of our result. Our attack has the following properties: the required known part of LSBs becomes smaller in the size of the public exponent e and it works for all exponents e (resp. d) when the exponent d (resp. e) has full-size bit length. For practical validation of our attack, we demonstrate several computer algebra experiments. In the experiments, we use the LLL algorithm and Gröbner basis computation. We achieve to obtain better experimental results than our theoretical result indicates for some cases.Declaration of Authorship ii Abstract iii Öz iv Acknowledgments v List of Figures viii List of Tables ix Abbreviations x 1 Introduction 1 1.1 A Short History of the Partial Key Exposure Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.2 Overview of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2 The RSA Cryptosystem 8 2.1 RSA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2.2 RSA Key Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.3 Multi-power RSA (Takagi’s Variant) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.4 Cryptanalysis of RSA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.4.1 Factoring N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.4.2 Implementation Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.4.2.1 Side-Channel Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.4.2.2 Bleichenbacher’s Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.4.3 Message Recovery Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.4.3.1 Håstad’s Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.4.3.2 Franklin-Reiter Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2.4.3.3 Coppersmith’s Short Pad Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2.4.4 Attacks Using Extra Knowledge on RSA Parameters . . . . . . . . 15 2.4.4.1 Wiener’s Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 2.4.4.2 Boneh-Durfee Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 3 Preliminaries 18 3.1 Lattice Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 3.2 Finding Small Roots of Polynomials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3.2.1 Finding Small Modular Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3.2.2 Complexity of the Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3.2.2.1 Polynomial Reduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3.2.2.2 Root Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3.2.3 Boneh-Durfee Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 4 Partial Key Exposure Attacks on Multi-Power RSA 28 4.1 Known Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 4.1.1 Attacks when ed ≡ 1 mod ( p−1)( q−1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 4.1.2 Attacks when ed ≡ 1 mod ( pr −pr−1)( q−1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 4.2 A New Attack with Known LSBs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 4.3 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 5 Conclusion and Discussions 39 Bibliograph

Enhanced fully homomorphic encryption scheme using modified key generation for cloud environment

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a special class of encryption that allows performing unlimited mathematical operations on encrypted data without decrypting it. There are symmetric and asymmetric FHE schemes. The symmetric schemes suffer from the semantically security property and need more performance improvements. While asymmetric schemes are semantically secure however, they pose two implicit problems. The first problem is related to the size of key and ciphertext and the second problem is the efficiency of the schemes. This study aims to reduce the execution time of the symmetric FHE scheme by enhancing the key generation algorithm using the Pick-Test method. As such, the Binary Learning with Error lattice is used to solve the key and ciphertext size problems of the asymmetric FHE scheme. The combination of enhanced symmetric and asymmetric algorithms is used to construct a multi-party protocol that allows many users to access and manipulate the data in the cloud environment. The Pick-Test method of the Sym-Key algorithm calculates the matrix inverse and determinant in one instance requires only n-1 extra multiplication for the calculation of determinant which takes 0(N3) as a total cost, while the Random method in the standard scheme takes 0(N3) to find matrix inverse and 0(N!) to calculate the determinant which results in 0(N4) as a total cost. Furthermore, the implementation results show that the proposed key generation algorithm based on the pick-test method could be used as an alternative to improve the performance of the standard FHE scheme. The secret key in the Binary-LWE FHE scheme is selected from {0,1}n to obtain a minimal key and ciphertext size, while the public key is based on learning with error problem. As a result, the secret key, public key and tensored ciphertext is enhanced from logq , 0(n2log2q) and ((n+1)n2log2q)2log q to n, (n+1)2log q and (n+1)2log q respectively. The Binary-LWE FHE scheme is a secured but noise-based scheme. Hence, the modulus switching technique is used as a noise management technique to scale down the noise from e and c to e/B and c/B respectively thus, the total cost for noise management is enhanced from 0(n3log2q) to 0(n2log q) . The Multi-party protocol is constructed to support the cloud computing on Sym-Key FHE scheme. The asymmetric Binary-LWE FHE scheme is used as a small part of the protocol to verify the access of users to any resource. Hence, the protocol combines both symmetric and asymmetric FHE schemes which have the advantages of efficiency and security. FHE is a new approach with a bright future in cloud computing