Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

On digital signatures

On digital signatures ON DIGITAL SIGNATURES Jerome Ho Saltzer MoloTo Laboratory for Computer Science Cambridge, Mass 02139 Recentlyj Diffie and Hellman [I] have suggested a novel application for cryptographic techniques: authentication of received messages without prior explicit and private agreement between sender and receiver They have used the term "digital signatures ~' to name the application~ because the problem being solved is analogous to that for which a handwritten signature is used Howeverj the scheme is less general~ in some important ways~ than traditional handwritten signatures. The limitations are sufficiently important that this short note outlines them in detail. Briefly~ Diffie and Hellman's technique is as follows. Every message originator who wishes to send messages that can be authenticated by any receiver devises a unique encipherment and decipherment function pair~ E i and Di, where the subscript i identifies the message originator. These two functions are chosen to have two properties: I) 2) For any message M, Di(Ei(M))=M. This property simply provides that an enciphered message can be deciphered. Complete knowledge of the function Di~ together with matching samples of cipher and clear text~ are not sufficient to allow deduction of the function Ei.* The message originator places on public record http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Association for Computing Machinery

Loading next page...
 
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/on-digital-signatures-cLJleLzMyY

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
0163-5980
DOI
10.1145/775332.775334
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

ON DIGITAL SIGNATURES Jerome Ho Saltzer MoloTo Laboratory for Computer Science Cambridge, Mass 02139 Recentlyj Diffie and Hellman [I] have suggested a novel application for cryptographic techniques: authentication of received messages without prior explicit and private agreement between sender and receiver They have used the term "digital signatures ~' to name the application~ because the problem being solved is analogous to that for which a handwritten signature is used Howeverj the scheme is less general~ in some important ways~ than traditional handwritten signatures. The limitations are sufficiently important that this short note outlines them in detail. Briefly~ Diffie and Hellman's technique is as follows. Every message originator who wishes to send messages that can be authenticated by any receiver devises a unique encipherment and decipherment function pair~ E i and Di, where the subscript i identifies the message originator. These two functions are chosen to have two properties: I) 2) For any message M, Di(Ei(M))=M. This property simply provides that an enciphered message can be deciphered. Complete knowledge of the function Di~ together with matching samples of cipher and clear text~ are not sufficient to allow deduction of the function Ei.* The message originator places on public record

Journal

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems ReviewAssociation for Computing Machinery

Published: Apr 1, 1978

There are no references for this article.