NET 311 – Introduction to

Cryptography

10- Introduction to Public Key Encryption

Contents of Part II of the course
 Introduction to PKE
 RSA
 Diffie-Hellman
Contents of this Lecture
 Revisiting symmetric algorithms
 Principles of Public key cryptography
 Practical aspects
 Number theory fundamentals
Introduction
 AKA asymmetric encryption
 Recent compared with symmetric algorithms
 publicly introduced by Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle in 1976
Symmetric algorithms revisited
 Properties
 the same secret key is used for encryption and decryption
 encryption and decryption function are similar (identical in DES and one-time pad)
Problems with symmetric cryptography
 Key distribution problem
 exchanging secret keys in a secure manner is very difficult if not impossible
 Key management
 have to deal with large number of keys
 each pair of users needs a separate pair of keys
𝑛 ∗(𝑛−1)
 n users will need 2
pairs of keys
 No protection against cheating
 Nonrepudiation cannot be done with symmetric cryptography since both parties have
the same key
Principles of asymmetric cryptography
 Use the “mailbox” principle
 everyone can drop a letter
 but only the owner can open the box
 principle - split the key
 the key for encryption needs not be private
 only the decryption key should be private
Principles of asymmetric cryptography
 Alice encrypts with a message with a public key
 Only Bob has the secret key used to decrypt and retrieve the message
Principles of asymmetric cryptography
 All asymmetric schemes are build on a common principle
not feasible to evaluate in reasonable
time period when using the best
known algorithm

Informal definition

can be evaluated in
polynomial time
Principles of asymmetric cryptography
 Two popular one-way functions used in PKE
 Integer factorization problems
 Given two large prime numbers, it easy to compute the product but very difficult to factorize
the given product
 discrete logarithm product
Practical aspects of public key cryptography
 Security mechanisms – main functions of PK cryptography
 Key establishment
 used to establish secret keys over an insecure channel
 Nonrepudiation
 providing nonrepudiation and message integrity
 Identification
 can identify entities using challenge-and-response protocols together
with digital signatures
 Encryption
Practical aspects of public key cryptography
 Public key algorithms have a major drawback
 they are computationally intensive i.e. extremely slow
 many symmetric algorithms exists that are 100x to 1000x faster than PK algorithms
 PK algorithms are rarely used for actual encryption of data
 In practice , hybrid systems are used
 Use PK to exchange keys and provide other security mechanisms
 Use symmetric algorithms for actual encryption
 One last problem
 How to prove authenticity of public keys
Using Public Key Encryption for Key Exchange
Important public key algorithms
 only 3 major families of PK algorithms that are of practical relevance
 Integer factorization schemes
 e.g. RSA
 Discrete Logarithm Schemes
 based on discrete logarithm problem in finite fields
 e.g. Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, El gamal, Digital Signature Algorithms (DSA)
 Elliptic Curve (EC) Schemes
 a generalization of discrete log algorithm
 e.g. Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) and ECDSA
NEXT
 Number theory fundamentals
 Euclidean Greatest Common Divisor Algorithm
 Euler’s Phi Function
 Fermat’s Little theorem