Pohlig–Hellman algorithm for computing discrete logarithms - math

I'm working on coding the Pohlig-Hellman Algorithm but I am having problem understand the steps in the algorithm based on the definition of the algorithm.
Going by the Wiki of the algorithm:
I know the first part 1) is to calculate the prime factor of p-1 - which is fine.
However, I am not sure what I need to do in steps 2) where you calculate the co-efficents:
Let x2 = c0 + c1(2).
125(180/2) = 12590 1 mod (181) so c0 = 0.
125(180/4) = 12545 1 mod (181) so c1 = 0.
Thus, x2 = 0 + 0 = 0.
and 3) put the coefficents together and solve in the chinese remainder theorem.
Can someone help with explaining this in plain english (i) - or pseudocode. I want to code the solution myself obviously but I cannot make any more progress unless i understand the algorithm.
Note: I have done a lot of searching for this and I read S. Pohlig and M. Hellman (1978). "An Improved Algorithm for Computing Logarithms over GF(p) and its Cryptographic Significance but its still not really making sense to me.
Thanks in advance
Update:
how come q(125) stays constant in this example.
Where as in this example is appears like he is calculating a new q each time.
To be more specific I don't understand how the following is computed:
Now divide 7531 by a^c0 to get
7531(a^-2) = 6735 mod p.

Let's start with the main idea behind Pohlig-Hellman. Assume that we are given y, g and p and that we want to find x, such that
y == gx (mod p).
(I'm using == to denote an equivalence relation). To simplify things, I'm also assuming that the order of g is p-1, i.e. the smallest positive k with 1==gk (mod p) is k=p-1.
An inefficient method to find x, would be to simply try all values in the range 1 .. p-1.
Somewhat better is the "Baby-step giant-step" method that requires O(p0.5) arithmetic operations. Both methods are quite slow for large p. Pohlig-Hellman is a significant improvement when p-1 has many factors. I.e. assume that
p-1 = n r
Then what Pohlig and Hellman propose is to solve the equation
yn == (gn)z
(mod p).
If we take logarithms to the basis g on both sides, this is the same as
n logg(y) == logg(yn) == nz (mod p-1).
n can be divided out, giving
logg(y) == z (mod r).
Hence x == z (mod r).
This is an improvement, since we only have to search a range 0 .. r-1 for a solution of z. And again "Baby-step giant-step" can be used to improve the search for z. Obviously, doing this once is not a complete solution yet. I.e. one has to repeat the algorithm above for every prime factor r of p-1 and then to use the Chinese remainder theorem to find x from the partial solutions. This works nicely if p-1 is square free.
If p-1 is divisible by a prime power then a similiar idea can be used. For example let's assume that p-1 = m qk.
In the first step, we compute z such that x == z (mod q) as shown above. Next we want to extend this to a solution x == z' (mod q2). E.g. if p-1 = m q2 then this means that we have to find z' such that
ym == (gm)z' (mod p).
Since we already know that z' == z (mod q), z' must be in the set {z, z+q, z+2q, ..., z+(q-1)q }. Again we could either do an exhaustive search for z' or improve the search with "baby-step giant-step". This step is repeated for every exponent of q, this is from knowing x mod qi we iteratively derive x mod qi+1.

I'm coding it up myself right now (JAVA). I'm using Pollard-Rho to find the small prime factors of p-1. Then using Pohlig-Hellman to solve a DSA private key. y = g^x. I am having the same problem..
UPDATE: "To be more specific I don't understand how the following is computed: Now divide 7531 by a^c0 to get 7531(a^-2) = 6735 mod p."
if you find the modInverse of a^c0 it will make sense
Regards

Related

how to solve mathematical expectation in hackerrank 20/20 hack february 2014

So this problem was given in Hackerrank 20/20 hack february :
Let’s consider a random permutation p1, p2, …, pN of numbers 1, 2, …, N and calculate the value F=(X2+…+XN-1)^K, where Xi equals 1 if one of the following two conditions holds: pi-1 < pi > pi+1 or pi-1 > pi < pi+1 and Xi equals 0 otherwise. What is the expected value of F?
Constraints: 1000 <= N <= 10^9, 1 <= K <= 5
I thought it was Eulerian number related problem. As the contest is over,I can see the solutions. But I don't understand any of them. Is there any tricks?
so a few words about my "solution" ;)
What I basically did:
1) write a brute force solver (obviously for N << 20)
-> this solver won't handle high values of N, as given in the constraints
2) analyze the output of the solutions to these (invalid) inputs
-> observe that with K=1, the output follows a straight line
-> K=2, is a quadratic function
-> K=3, is a cubic function, and so on
3) find the parameters for each function (K=1 - 5) by using a solver, or how I did it, wolfram alpha ;)
-> additionally I "normalized" each parameter to only have one division afterwards
4) use any programming language / big integer class to solve the correct inputs in O(1)
I'm pretty sure that one can come up with these parameters in a very clever way, but for me, during the contest, this solution was easy and fast enough without having to think too much about the "why" ;)

MASH-2 hash function

We have taken the MASH-2 hash function in a college course, and in the exam we are confronted
with questions to calculate something like this ((62500)^257)) mod (238194151) using only a scientific calculator. now i know some theories with a^b (mod n) but the problem i present above is even hard to calculate manually. i think it would take about 15 minutes to solve this. i would like to know if there is a faster way to do this. or even if there is some way to do it in binary (convert the number to binary and then do some manipulations). i need to able to do this by hand with a scientific calculator.
In this special case the prime factor decomposition of a = 62500 = 2² ⋅ 5⁶ is very simple.
You can use this to calculate (2²)²⁵⁷ and (5⁶)²⁵⁷ first and calculate then the product.
But the problem I see, is that for n = 238194151 my scientific calculator can not calculate n² correctly. If your calculator can do this, it should be no problem.
Since gcd(a, b) = 1 you also could use CRT, but I'm not sure if you can find the prime factors n = 13 ⋅ 59 ⋅ 310553 with only a scientific calculator. If so, this will make it much easier. You just calculate a²⁵⁷ mod (13⋅59) and a²⁵⁷ mod 310553 and put the results together with CRT.
You can also use only Exponentiation by squaring so you only have to calculate 8 squares.

Fast Fourier Transform Pseudocode?

The purpose of the following code is to convert a polynomial from coefficient representation into value representation by dividing it into its odd and even powers and then recursing on the smaller polynomials.
function FFT(A, w)
Input: Coefficient representation of a polynomials A(x) of degree ≤ n-1, where n
is a power of 2w, an nth root of unity.
Output: Value representation A(w^0),...,A(w^(n-1))
if w = 1; return A(1)
express A(x) in the form A_e(x^2) and xA_o(x^2) /*where A_e are the even powers and A_o
the odd.*/
call FFT(A_e,w^2) to evaluate A_e at even of powers of w
call FFT(A_o,w^2) to evaluate A_o at even powers of w
for j = 0 to n-1;
compute A(w^j) = A_e(w^(2j))+w^j(A_o(w^(2j)))
return A(w^0),...,A(w^(n-1))
What is the for loop being used for?
Why is the pseudocode only adding the smaller polynomials, doesn't it need to subtract them too? (to calculate A(-x)). Isn't that what the algorithm completely based on? Adding and subtracting the smaller polynomials to reduce the points in half?*
Why are powers of "w" being evaluated as opposed to "x"?
I am not a too sure if this belongs here, since the question is quite mathematical. If you feel this question is off-topic, I would appreciate it if you moved it to a site where you felt this question would be more appropriate, rather that just closing it.
*Psuedocode was gotten from Algorithms by S. Dasgupta. Page 71.
The loop is for recursion.
No need to add for negative x; the FFT transforms from time to frequency space.

Algorithm for finding an equidistributed solution to a linear congruence system

I face the following problem in a cryptographical application: I have given a set of linear congruences
a[1]*x[1]+a[2]*x[2]+a[3]*x[3] == d[1] (mod p)
b[1]*x[1]+b[2]*x[2]+b[3]*x[3] == d[2] (mod p)
c[1]*x[1]+c[2]*x[2]+c[3]*x[3] == d[3] (mod p)
Here, x is unknown an a,b,c,d are given
The system is most likely underdetermined, so I have a large solution space. I need an algorithm that finds an equidistributed solution (that means equidistributed in the solution space) to that problem using a pseudo-random number generator (or fails).
Most standard algorithms for linear equation systems that I know from my linear algebra courses are not directly applicable to congruences as far as I can see...
My current, "safe" algorithm works as follows: Find all variable that appear in only one equation, and assign a random value. Now if in each row, only one variable is unassigned, assign the value according to the congruence. Otherwise fail.
Can anyone give me a clue how to solve this problem in general?
You can use gaussian elimination and similar algorithms just like you learned in your linear algebra courses, but all arithmetic is performed mod p (p is a prime). The one important difference is in the definition of "division": to compute a / b you instead compute a * (1/b) (in words, "a times b inverse"). Consider the following changes to the math operations normally used
addition: a+b becomes a+b mod p
subtraction: a-b becomes a-b mod p
multiplication: a*b becomes a*b mod p
division: a/b becomes: if p divides b, then "error: divide by zero", else a * (1/b) mod p
To compute the inverse of b mod p you can use the extended euclidean algorithm or alternatively compute b**(p-2) mod p.
Rather than trying to roll this yourself, look for an existing library or package. I think maybe Sage can do this, and certainly Mathematica, and Maple, and similar commercial math tools can.

finding a/b mod c

I know this may seem like a math question but i just saw this in a contest and I really want to know how to solve it.
We have
a (mod c)
and
b (mod c)
and we're looking for the value of the quotient
(a/b) (mod c)
Any ideas?
In the ring of integers modulo C, these equations are equivalent:
A / B (mod C)
A * (1/B) (mod C)
A * B-1(mod C).
Thus you need to find B-1, the multiplicative inverse of B modulo C. You can find it using e.g. extended Euclidian algorithm.
Note that not every number has a multiplicative inverse for the given modulus.
Specifically, B-1 exists if and only if gcd(B, C) = 1 (i.e. B and C are coprime).
See also
Wikipedia/Modular multiplicative inverse
Wikipedia/Extended Euclidian algorithm
Modular multiplicative inverse: Example
Suppose we want to find the multiplicative inverse of 3 modulo 11.
That is, we want to find
x = 3-1(mod 11)
x = 1/3 (mod 11)
3x = 1 (mod 11)
Using extended Euclidian algorithm, you will find that:
x = 4 (mod 11)
Thus, the modular multiplicative inverse of 3 modulo 11 is 4. In other words:
A / 3 == A * 4 (mod 11)
Naive algorithm: brute force search
One way to solve this:
3x = 1 (mod 11)
Is to simply try x for all values 0..11, and see if the equation holds true. For small modulus, this algorithm may be acceptable, but extended Euclidian algorithm is much better asymptotically.
There are potentially many answers. When all you have is k = B mod C, then B could be any k+CN for all integer N.
This means B could potentially be very large. So large, in fact, to make A/B approach zero.
However, that's just one way to respond.
I think it can be written as(But not sure)
(a/b)%c = ((a)%(b*c))/b

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