A Modular Approach to Key Distribution
CRYPTO '90 Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology
A formal approach to security architectures
EUROCRYPT'91 Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on Theory and application of cryptographic techniques
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Two protocols are presented that accomplish the same goal as the original Diffie-Hellman protocol, namely, to establish a common secret key using only public messages. They are based on n-fold composition of some suitable elementary function. The first protocol is shown to fail always when the elementary function is chosen to be linear. This does not preclude its use for a suitable nonlinear elementary function. The second protocol is shown to be equivalent to the Diffie-Hellman protocol when the elementary function is chosen to be linear. Some examples are given to illustrate the use of both protocols. It is still an open problem whether the presented approach allows for an improvement in terms of speed and/or security over the original DH-protocol.