124ms Logic and Sets

Tutorial Sheet 4: Congruence arithmetic

Topics covered: Congruences, public key cryptography.

1. Construct the addition and multiplication tables for Z2 , Z3 , Z4 , Z5 , Z6 , Z7 , Z8 , Z9 , Z10 ,

Z11 .

(a) Construct tables showing the additive and multiplicative inverse when possible.
(b) In which of them do some numbers fail to have a multiplicative inverse?
(c) (Harder) What is special about the numbers which do not have a multiplicative
inverse?

2. Solve the following equations, or say why they cannot be solved:

(a) x + 5 = 1 in Z6 to Z11 .
(b) 3x = 2 in Z4 to Z11 .
(c) (Harder) 6x + 1 = x + 2 in Z6 to Z11 .
(d) x2 = 2 in each of Z3 to Z11 .

3. Calculate each of

(a) 24 , 34 and 44 in Z5 .
(b) 25 , 35 , 45 and 55 in Z6 .
(c) 26 , 36 up to 66 in Z7 .
(d) 27 , 37 , up to 77 in Z8 .
(e) And so on, finishing with 210 up to 1010 in Z11 .

What do you notice?

4. Calculate each of the following powers using the squaring algorithm:

(a) 1516 in Z17

(b) 7545 in Z103
(c) 1324574 in Z24179

5. Messages are to be encoded using the RSA method, and the primes chosen are 13 and
17, so that n = 221, and z = 192; e is chosen to be 11. Thus to encode a number, w, we
need to compute the remainder when we is divided by n.
Encode the numbers 5, 8, 17, 52 and 103.
To decode, we need the unique number, d, such that 11d divided by z(= 192) has re-
mainder 1; this number is 35.
Check that the remainder on division by n of each coded message raised to the power
of 35 is the original message.

RJL,124ms\tut4.tex