3 research outputs found
Groups from Cyclic Infrastructures and Pohlig-Hellman in Certain Infrastructures
In discrete logarithm based cryptography, a method by Pohlig and Hellman
allows solving the discrete logarithm problem efficiently if the group order is
known and has no large prime factors. The consequence is that such groups are
avoided. In the past, there have been proposals for cryptography based on
cyclic infrastructures. We will show that the Pohlig-Hellman method can be
adapted to certain cyclic infrastructures, which similarly implies that certain
infrastructures should not be used for cryptography. This generalizes a result
by M\"uller, Vanstone and Zuccherato for infrastructures obtained from
hyperelliptic function fields.
We recall the Pohlig-Hellman method, define the concept of a cyclic
infrastructure and briefly describe how to obtain such infrastructures from
certain function fields of unit rank one. Then, we describe how to obtain
cyclic groups from discrete cyclic infrastructures and how to apply the
Pohlig-Hellman method to compute absolute distances, which is in general a
computationally hard problem for cyclic infrastructures. Moreover, we give an
algorithm which allows to test whether an infrastructure satisfies certain
requirements needed for applying the Pohlig-Hellman method, and discuss whether
the Pohlig-Hellman method is applicable in infrastructures obtained from number
fields. Finally, we discuss how this influences cryptography based on cyclic
infrastructures.Comment: 14 page
The Infrastructure of a Global Field of Arbitrary Unit Rank
In this paper, we show a general way to interpret the infrastructure of a
global field of arbitrary unit rank. This interpretation generalizes the prior
concepts of the giant step operation and f-representations, and makes it
possible to relate the infrastructure to the (Arakelov) divisor class group of
the global field. In the case of global function fields, we present results
that establish that effective implementation of the presented methods is indeed
possible, and we show how Shanks' baby-step giant-step method can be
generalized to this situation.Comment: Revised version. Accepted for publication in Math. Com