Date of Award
Spring 5-7-2021
Document Type
Honors Project
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science
Department
Mathematics
Department Chair or Program Director
Esunge, Julius
First Advisor
Helmstutler, Randall
Major or Concentration
Mathematics
Abstract
We introduce a variation of Shanks’ baby-step/giant-step (BSGS) to carry out a chosen plaintext attack on RSA. The original usage of BSGS is to find a solution to the discrete log problem. Although BSGS is guaranteed to find a solution, it is not guaranteed to find the matching RSA private key. Our variation of BSGS finds the matching private key d by using the order of the plaintext message to generate a set of solutions. We then use the length of this set to determine the most likely candidate for φ(n). We use a large data set to test the efficiency and accuracy of our variation.
Recommended Citation
Ferrell, Makayla, "Simulations of an Attack on RSA" (2021). Student Research Submissions. 388.
https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/388