To what extent does the difficulty of ascertaining the normal subgroups of an abelian group correlate with the efficiency and effectiveness of a cryptographic protocol?
To a great extent, the difficulty of ascertaining normal subgroups correlates highly with the efficiency of a cryptographic protocol by providing more security at a given key length.
Pose a problem scenario with an eavesdropped connection Highlight ‘commonly known’ symmetric encryption Frame why the answer might be obtained with math Hint towards using group-theory to formalize and generalize these
TS: The first protocol developed to address this motivating problem was RSA encryption. Leveraging intuitive properties of numbers, RSA establishes our idea of ‘one-way operations’ using simple multiplication of large, highly prime (minimal divisors), numbers. Basic implementation Math behind it Modular arithmetic Fermat's little theorem Shortcomings
(Carmen et al. 883)
TS: Group theory provides us a way to generalize certain, often intuitive, properties of number systems, by using axiomatic structure to classify groups ‘up to isomorphism’ and to prove various properties about their structures. A ‘Group’ boils down to a set, infinite or finite, and an operation that takes two elements and maps it to another while maintaining some structure. It’s common to think that this structure is too vague, or broad, but, in fact, it’s enough to prove sweeping conjectures and determine non-trivial properties, thereby making itself a staple of modern mathematics.
Again motivating problem in “plain english” Introduce formal definition: associativity identity inverse Relate to certain intuitive examples (i.e., additive group of integers, multiplicative reals, numbers modulo prime, symmetries of a square) Differentiate abelian and non-abelian groups Describe RSA cryptography in group theory terms
(Koblitz 42) (Sacarino 55)
TS: Cryptographic schemes like RSA rely on the commutative property of their underlying abelian groups and their underlying difficulty of reversing a one-way operation, that is, solving it’s discrete logarithm, to ensure computational impossibility of a brute-force attack. Notably, since all subgroups of an abelian group are normal, this idea of reversing a one-way operation, in many cases, boils down to determining the normal subgroup generated by repeated operations, i.e., the hidden subgroup problem.
Introduce idea of subgroups State hidden subgroup problem Idea of a prime group (include/restate Lagrange’s theorem — order of subgroup must divide order of group) Discuss factoring mod p, i.e., subgroups of a cyclic group of prime order. Question whether there is another way
(National Institute of Standards and Technology) (Sacarino) (Koblitz)
TS: Given the generalizations provided by group theory, there is likely another underlying group that could provide more structural resistance to ascertaining subgroups.
Numbers have certain properties that make factorizing take less time than theoretically required Begin with Circle group law Show that it’s unfortunately isomorphic to a cyclic group so isn’t helpful Motivate another abelian variety Examine Elliptic curves (next genus up) Describe chord/tangent law on elliptic curves Prove that an EC is isomorphic to a direct product of cyclic groups Describe how the hidden subgroup problem is made more difficult because the EC Discrete Log is more difficult
(Koblitz)
TS: Elliptic curves reach a sweet-spot balance between difficulty in a public key scheme and length of the key pairs used.
Discuss how another abelian variety can be more secure, but is less feasible in the real world ECC only uses normal arithmetic operations, and not too many at that Examine implementations of these technologies (ECDLC etc…) Convey the scope/ubiquity of their implementation (National Institute of Standards and Technology) (Sacarino)
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