11.09 Programmer's Challenge

Dearest Programmer's Challenge Reader,
Due to recent reorganization and some printing developments, the September issue of MacTech will be delayed. For this reason we are posting the Programmer's Challenge today. THE DEADLINE FOR THIS CHALLENGE IS SEPTEMBER 15, 1995. This special deadline applies only to this challenge and no other.

Programmer's Challenge

by Bob Boonstra, send questions to progchallenge@xplain.com

Reversible Scrambling Algorithm

According to tradition, September is Assembly Language Challenge month here at MacTech, and we continue that tradition this month. Your challenge is to do some simple arithmetic - raising a number to a power, and taking the remainder of the result modulo another number. Simple, right? To make things interesting, though, the numbers are going to be a little larger than you are used to dealing with. Hundreds of decimal digits long, in fact. "Why," you may ask? We'll get into that in a minute, but there are a couple of hints in the title of this month's challenge.

The data structure to be used for the large numbers in this Challenge, and the prototype for the code you should write are:

typedef struct BigNum { short numDig; /* the number of bytes in the BigNum */ 
                unsigned char *dig;   /* dig[0] is the most significant byte */ 
                                      /* dig[numDig-1] is least significant */ 
} BigNum;

void PowerAndRemainder( BigNum *msg, 
                        BigNum *exp, /* calculate msg to the exp power, */ 
                        BigNum *n,   /* take the remainder modulo n */
                        BigNum *res  /* and store the result in res */ );

For example, the value 1048573 (0xFFFFD) would be provided to you in a BigNum b with the values b.numDig=3, b.dig[0] = 0x0F, b.dig[1]=0xFF, and b.dig[2]=0xFD. The first three arguments will be provided as input when PowerAndRemainder is called; you are to generate both elements of the BigNum struct for the res argument. The storage for all of the BigNums in the call to PowerAndRemainder will be allocated by the caller. All BigNums will be positive integers, and none of the BigNums will be larger than 128 bytes in length (i.e., b.numDig will be no larger than 128). There is no restriction on the amount of memory you may use (within reason).

Those of you with some number theory in your background may recognize what a function like this might be used for. If the modulus n is the product of two large primes p and q, one can find values e and d for the exponent with the property that they are inverses of one another, but that neither can be easily derived from the other, provided prime numbers p and q are not divulged. If you calculate PowerAndRemainder(msg,e,n,c), and I then calculate PowerAndRemainder(c,d,n,x), then the result x turns out to be identical to the original value msg if e and d are relatively prime to (p-1)*(q-1). Now what do you suppose such a function might be useful for?

Your solution may use any combination of ANSI C and/or 68K assembly language, along with your choice of either the THINK C or MetroWerks C 68K compilers. I considered making this a PowerPC challenge, but I wasn't confident that enough people are proficient with PPC assembly just yet - perhaps next September. In the meantime, you can look forward to a native PPC challenge next month.

If you are interested in some sample values to test your code, send me email and I'll provide some.