Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-computer-science-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2015/computer-security/3/e/i/solution
Past exam of the computer science course of the University of Oxford 2015 Computer security 3 e i Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-31
The standard attack on this raw trapdoor construction chooses a candidate digital signature first, computes , and uses a failure of preimage resistance to find with . Thenso verifies. The resulting message is selected by the inversion procedure, rather than being an arbitrary prescribed document. This is an existential forgery under a key-only signature attack whenever the inversion weakness applies with nonnegligible success to those sampled digests.
The phrase “fails to be preimage resistant” must be read with its target distribution. Since is a permutation, uniform gives a uniform -bit digest; if inversion works only on a tiny identifiable exceptional set, this sampling method need not be feasible. Merely knowing a valid signed message and recovering that same message from its digest is not a new forgery. Producing a different message there requires a failure of second-preimage resistance. Part solution removes the coverage qualification by explicitly granting inversion at every digest.
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