Week 5: ElGamal Encryption

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog!

This week I learned about ElGamal encryption, an alternative to RSA encryption. The math behind ElGamal encryption is much more accessible than RSA encryption which requires knowledge of Fermat’s Little Theorem or Euler’s Totient Theorem, so I may want to present the math that is used in cybersecurity as it relates to ElGamal encryption rather than RSA encryption. Either way, the math behind the implementation of either encryption system will cover more or less the same math as use of either encryption system involves the generation of large prime numbers, so the primality tests that I looked at before will be relevant to both. Also, much of the programming that I did for RSA can be reused for ElGamal, which also requires computation of large exponents (mod another large number) and multiplicative inverses. These 2 encryption systems also have different computational complexity assumptions, which may be important in highlighting the different components of encryption algorithms.

I look forward to writing code to perform ElGamal encryption as I have for RSA encryption.