Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-31-2009

First Advisor

Joshua Holden

Abstract

In an age of digital information, security is of utmost importance. Many encryption schemes, such as the Diffie-Hellman Key Agreement and RSA Cryptosystem, use a function which maps x to y by a modular power map with generator g. The inverse of this function - trying to find x from y - is called the discrete logarithm problem. In most cases, n is a prime number. In some cases, however, n may be a composite number. In particular, we will look at when n = p^b for a prime p. We will show different techniques of obtaining graphs of this mapping and then we look to see whether the above mapping for the described n looks like a random map, and, if it does not, observe what we can that would help in solving the discrete logarithm problem.

Comments

MSTR 09-07

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