Homework 8 (due 3/7)
CSC 233


Remember: at the same time, your rough draft of the paper is due.

We quickly talked about the Lorenz cipher (chapter 6 contains a bit of material, much more is available on Tony Sale's page on the Lorenz cipher), and continued with modern cryptography, and the basics of public-key cryptography. In particular, we saw Diffie-Hellman key-exchagen (see the book). We also covered some modular arithmetic (including Fermat's Little Theorem).

If you need more material on modular arithmetic, check


1. (Menus) You have located the crib "ninteenhundredandfortyfive" in a piece of ciphertext.

1     6     11    16    21    26
NINET EENHU NDRED ANDFO RTYFI VE
DTAMO NPUBV IHMGI PKLZJ TOWDR LX

You want to find loops and construct a menu. For example here is a loop of length 3:

      25
   I  ->  R
   \     /
 2  \   /  21
     v v
      T
   

In word: I turns to T (2), R turns to T (21) I turns to R (25).

Construct a menu including this and at least three other loops (there are multiple loops of lengths 3 and 4). Write the menu in the style of class, with the positions next to the arrows, and the arrows pointing from the plaintext letter to the ciphertext letter.

2. (Modular Arithmetic) Compute the following numbers:

3. (Diffie-Hellman) Suppose Alice and Bob have agreed on the modolus 13 for the Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

4. (Diffie-Hellman) Suppose Alice and Bob have agreed on the modulus 17, and the base d = 3. Alice uses as her secret function exponentiation with a = 5, Bob uses as his secret function exponentiation to the b = 7th power. Show how Alice and Bob arrive at their common secret, that is, what they compute, what the communicate, and what they end up with.


Marcus Schaefer
Last updated: March 1st, 2006.