Merkle Puzzles Revisited — Finding Matching Elements between Lists

B. Christianson, D. Wheeler

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)
26 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Consider the following problem. A and B each have a N-element set of bit-strings. They wish to find all collisions, in other words to find the common strings of their sets or to establish that there are none. How much data must A and B exchange to do this? Problems of this type arise in the context of Merkle puzzles, for example where A and B propose to use the collision between two randomly constructed lists to construct a cryptographic key. Here we give a protocol for finding all the collisions. Provided the number of collisions is small relative to N/ log2 N the protocol requires on the order of log2 N messages and the total amount of data which A and B need exchange is about 4.5N bits. The collision set can also be determined in three messages containing a total of at most 9N bits provided N < 21023.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)87-94
JournalLecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
Volume2467
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2002

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