Generalizations of the Diffie-Hellman protocol : exposition and implementation

Abstract

A generalisation of the Diffie-Hellman protocol is studied in this dissertation. In the generalisation polynomials are used to reduce the representation size of a public key and linear shift registers for more efficient computations. These changes are important for the implementation of the protocol in con- strained environments. The security of the Diffie-Hellman protocol and its generalisation is based on the same computations problems. Lastly three examples of the generalisation and their implementation are discussed. For two of the protocols, models are given to predict the execution time and it is determined how well these model predictions are.