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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/K51259/01
Title: DIGITAL SIGNATURES AND HASH FUNCTIONS
Principal Investigator: Piper, Professor F
Other Investigators:
Wild, Professor P
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Mathematics
Organisation: Royal Holloway, Univ of London
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 March 1996 Ends: 28 February 1999 Value (£): 114,471
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Digital Signal Processing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
This project concerns the design and analysis of digital signature schemes, from both the theoretical and implementational perspectives. The project will consider some of the problems associated with current schemes, seek solutions to these problems, analyse the fundamental requirements of a signature scheme, leading to the design of comprehensive, efficient, secure schemes. The essence of a digital signature is that anyone can verify a signature but only one person can sign. Thus it is impossible to divorce digital signatures from one-way functions and they will play a central roll in this project. For practical reasons, it is usually desirable to apply the one-way function only once to a block of fixed length. Therefore the message must be 'condensed' by a hashing function to a single block before it is signed. The project will begin with a study of one-way functions and hash functions. There are two fundamental approaches to these functions: one based on difficult mathematical problems and the other based on combining simple transforms to produce a complex result. The second phase of the project will be an analysis of how these one-way functions fit into a digital signature scheme, how they are used to ensure that forgery is not possible and that repudiation of a signature is not possible. Fundamental to this is the integrity of the secret key and the relation of the key to efficient computation techniques will be of prime importance.
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