|  Carl
W. Seward
email: cwseward@mail.ecsu.edu
Mentor:
Dr. Ernest Stitzinger
Internship: Minority Graduate Education –
Summer Research Experience (MGE – SRE)
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and North Carolina
State University
Title: Investigating Methods of the Hill,
RSA, and ElGamal Cryptosystems To Determine Security Levels
of Encrypted Messages
Cryptography
is the study of techniques that can be used to disguise a
message so that only the intended recipient of a message can
remove the disguise and read the message. The simplest way
to disguise a message is to replace every occurrence of each
specific character with a different character, for which such
methods are known as substitution ciphers. However, since
these ciphers are relatively easy to decrypt from the encryption,
it can be asked if there exist other methods, methods from
a mathematical prospective, which can raise the level of security
of an encrypted message.
In this research, the investigator studied
methods of three cryptosystems to determine which method provided
the most relative security for encrypted messages. This was
done by first studying elementary algebraic cryptosystems
to understand their defined properties, followed by investigating
three methods of encryption, namely, the Hill Cryptosystem,
the RSA Cryptosystem, and the ElGamal Cryptosystem. All three
of these encryption methods were then used in the mathematical
software package of Maple to show how this software package
can be used to encrypt and decrypt messages.
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