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Homework 6 – Due Tuesday, March 20
- Consider a cipher that has the following property: When you view the
plaintext bits and ciphertext bits as binary numbers, the cipher
preserves the evenness of the number. In other words, if the plaintext
is an even number then the ciphertext will also be an even number,
and if the plaintext is odd then the ciphertext will also be odd.
- Prove that such a cipher cannot be IND-CPA secure.
- Joe decides to "fix" the cipher by doing the following: he adds one additional bit to the key, and then adds this (as a number) to the ciphertext after encryption. If this key bit is chosen randomly, then half the time even numbers map to even numbers, and the other half of the time even numbers map to odd numbers. Since this is random and unpredictable if the bit isn't known, he thinks this fixes the problem. However, it is still not IND-CPA secure -- prove this.
- Prove that such a cipher cannot be IND-CPA secure.
- Give the RSA algorithm, including descriptions of how keys are generated and
how encryption and decryption work. Use formulas, and describe the
size of values (i.e., number of bits) used in a typical real system.
Explain why decryption is the inverse if encryption (i.e., what is the
mathematics that explains why M=D(PRa,E(PUa,M)) for all messages
M -- you can give a simplified explanation, in which you assume
that M is relative prime to the modulus n).
- Joe makes a system using RSA for public key cryptography, but in the key generation routine uses the standard C library rand() function for random values, which uses a 15-bit value for a seed. Why is this insecure? Be very specific in your answer, describing a real, practical attack with an explanation of the time complexity of the attack.