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Bi-College Math Colloquium

Monday, October 2, 2017 - 4:00pm

J. Robert Buchanan

Millersville University

Location

Bryn Mawr College

Park Science Building, Room 338

Tea will precede the talk at 3:30 pm in Park Science Building, Room 339.

A novel and unique cryptosystem making use of a small set of private security parameters and public initialization values to produce a pseudorandom byte stream with large period will be described. The byte stream can be used as a one-time stream cipher for securing communication between parties and for data archival. The cryptosystem makes use of geometry and number theory to generate a set of large prime integers and then from the primes a column-periodic matrix of bytes from which further calculation produces a pseudorandom, long period byte stream. The presentation discusses the design and operation of the system and states many potential questions of interest to the community of mathematical and cryptological researchers. Foremost among these questions are determining the most appropriate method for assessing the cryptographic strength of the algorithm and determining any weaknesses in the security of the algorithm.