Chapter Summary

This chapter introduces the most common computationally intractable mathematical problems on which the security of public-key cryptosystems banks. We also describe some algorithms known till date for solving these difficult computational problems.

To start with, we enumerate these computational problems. The first problem in the row is the integer factorization problem (IFP) and its several variants. Some problems that are provably or believably equivalent to the IFP are the totient problem, problems associated with the RSA algorithm, and the modular square root problem. The next class of problems includes the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) and its variants on elliptic curves (ECDLP) and hyperelliptic curves (HECDLP). The ...

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