Paper 4, Section I, 3G3 G

Coding and Cryptography | Part II, 2019

(a) Describe Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Why is it believed to be a secure system?

(b) Consider the following authentication procedure. Alice chooses public key NN for the Rabin-Williams cryptosystem. To be sure we are in communication with Alice we send her a 'random item' rm2modNr \equiv m^{2} \bmod N. On receiving rr, Alice proceeds to decode using her knowledge of the factorisation of NN and finds a square root m1m_{1} of rr. She returns m1m_{1} to us and we check rm12modNr \equiv m_{1}^{2} \bmod N. Is this authentication procedure secure? Justify your answer.

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