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Monthly Journal: Publishes theoretical and applied research in all areas of Discrete Mathematical Sciences, Cryptography, Combinatorics, Elliptic Curves and Information Security.

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Open Access Research Article

On the use of Egyptian fractions for stream ciphers

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pp. 139–152Vol. 26Issue 1February 2021DOI: 10.1080/09720529.2021.1923921 Crossmark XML
Received:
30 Sep 2020
Accepted:
28 Feb 2021
Published Online:
14 Nov 2021
Article type:
Research Article
Language:
EN
Article no.:
JDMSC-1336
Pages:
139–152

Abstract

Within the scope of the mutual interference between modern number theory and chaos-based cryptography, and as it is well-known and already explored for the decimal or the continued fraction expansion of irrational numbers, interesting random-like behaviors seem to be hidden in Egyptian fraction expansions, thus suggesting new chaos-based encryption systems. In fact, at a practical level, and as will be shown through the present study, concatenation of involved denominators and binary expansion generally lead to pseudo-random streams which satisfactorily pass the NIST statistical test suite for randomness. Then, to a certain extent, and for cryptographic purposes, this can be considered as a new tool to complete the conventional class of already-in-use pseudo-random number generators. Some mathematical issues, however, have to be clarified, as for example the chaoticity of the process obtained after converting these denominators to fractional parts of a wandering sequence of real numbers in the unit interval. To the best of our knowledge, and from a cryptographic point of view, previous works on the subject are limited to statistical tests (and subsequent cryptographic analysis) of the resulting one-time pads or stream ciphers, but no rigorous study has been conducted to justify these methods within chaos theory. Considering Egyptian expansions as a working example and using the term “chaotic” in the sense of Devaney, this is what our proposal is aimed at in the present work.

Keywords

Subject Classifications

11A5537A2574H65 & 94A60

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