US Data Security Public-Key Challenge

US Data Security Inc. is pleased to announce the establishment of a contest on an exciting new method of Public key encryption. It is called the TTM (Tame Transformation Method) (U.S. patent 5,740,250) public-key system.

It is widely agreed that all current public-key systems, such as RSA, are too slow to stand alone independently of secret-key systems. All current public-key systems are used mainly for the purpose of key-exchanges to serve other secret-key systems, hence the so called "hybrid" combinations of PGP, RSA+RC4 and others. Faster public-key systems to fulfill the promises of the original idea of a public-key system are called for. Furthermore, the expansion of the Internet establishs the central role of PC's. The needs of PC users must be satisfied.

From the mathematical point of view, the TTM algorithm is intuitvely natural and less cumbersome to use than methods that are number-theory based. The algorithm utilizes the knowledge of higher dimensional affine spaces, and is based on the calculations of concrete polynomials. Moreover, it has the novel functions of error detection and master key.

The preliminary TTM (versions 3.x and 4.x using C language) software implementation developed by US Data Security Inc. is user friendly and much faster than all current public-key software. It had been agreed by most "experts" that a public-key cryptographic system is slower than a secret key system. However, there is a big break through! The version TTM 4.3 (click on http://www.AltiVec.org/articles/ look for "Cryptograpgy, Finite Fields and AltiVec" by B. Lucier for a reference) with an encryption speed of 18 million bit per second and a decryption speed of 50 million bit per second is much faster than the speeds of the secret key "triple DES 56" which are 6 million bit per second for both encryption and decryption. The complexity of TTM 4.5 is (2⁹⁰) according to newest attacking schemes. This complexity is much higher than the commonly used criterion of (2⁸⁰) for the so-called "strong" cryptographic system.

Most versions of TTM work on various types of platforms, such as PC, Mac, Unix etc. The implementation of TTM 4.5 is carried on a 400 MHz PowerPC G4 machine with chip 7400 (with altivec technology). The signature can be as short as 128 bits. TTM 4.5 can verify up to 3 millions signatures per second as comparing to 7 signatures for Bsafe 3.0 of RSA 1024.

For the example of TTM 4.5, for the user who owns the private key, the speed of encoding can be increased to 50 million bit/sec. This is a special function of TTM. It is fast enough to encrypt and decrypt a full screen movie as "Titanic" in real time.

A comparison of software for various pubic-key systems
	TTM 4.5	Others
background theory	abstract algebra	number theory
public key	yes	yes
private key	yes	yes
signature	yes	yes
master key	yes	no
error detection	yes. one error in 10⁹⁶	no
speed (encode)	34 Mb/sec	7 kb/sec for RSA 1024 Bsafe 3.0
speed (decode)	60 Mb/sec	7 kb/sec for RSA 1024 Bsafe 3.0
security	3*10¹³MIPS-years	3*10¹¹MIPS-years for RSA 1024
data expanding rate	2.2	RSA 1, EC C 2

For visitors who are interested in the challenge, please read the sections on "Rules", "Format" and "Contest" where several contests are posted. From the second contest on, various awards are posted to show our appreciations to serious visitors. The Challenges I and II are for the beginners. The method of TTM is not well understood among experts and we wish more people can learn the subject. We call Challenge I and II the "Learner's Challenge" to spread the science. The award for the second contest (on TTM 2.1) is $ 1,000 . The award for the third contest (on TTM 2.3) is $ 5,000. For each contest, a "chosen plaintext attack" is provided.

TTM is good for re-encryption: With privacy and complicated legal systems the www common carriers and service providers may need to encrypt on top of all individual protections. And furthermore TTM is good for DVD, large database, or video protection. Because TTM is so fast it is the only asymetric encryption solution for high speed high data rate problems.

Smart Card Applications: for an "untrustworth" PC, the tentative report of our Lab is that the requirement is 236 bytes for the private key (for the maps at the two ends which may possibly be reduced to 128 bytes subject to our testing) 2k bytes for the public key plus 300 bytes (for the program) speed exceeding 50k signatures. The security is 10¹⁵ MIPS-years, much stronger than RSA 1024. For a "trustworth" PC, one may simply put the set up numbers in the card for the machine to generate the private key. Then it requires only 30--40 bytes memory in the smart card and less than 1 second to set up. No expensive "co-processor" is needed.

Wireless communication Applications: it is easy to use our public-key encryption system by software only, without any expensive hardware part. The private key size is 170 bytes (for the maps at the two ends which may possibly be reduced to 128 bytes subject to our testing) plus 300 bytes (for the program and the records of two intermediate maps) and the public key is 3,952 bytes with a speed exceeding 64 k bit/sec for a third generation cell phone. The security is 10²⁰ MIPS-years, much stronger than RSA 1024. The wireless cell phone users simply exchange their public keys at the beginning of communication. All exchanges will be confidential. The encrytpion system has a function of signature.

The TTM encryption is suitable for parallel computation and hardware implementations. US Data Security Inc. will license TTM technology to others or to form partnerships. Interested parties should read the section on "License".

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