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My sincerest apologies for having to repost this but I can't edit or post a comment from the previous one I asked with a guest account.

I'm learning about the Diffie-Hellman and ElGamal ciphers, but I'm really struggling trying to decipher the exercise my lecturer has given me.

The information I've been given (all in decimals) is

g

p

a (Alice private key)

A (Alice public key)

B (Bob public key)

C (ciphertext)

I've tried calculating a shared secret S = B^a mod p then inversing it and multiplying that by C as my lecturer described in the lecture but it doesn't work. Is that wrong and if yes what am I supposed to do??

I used this tool to perform the inverse operation (inverseMod(a,b)) http://www.mobilefish.com/services/big_number_equation/big_number_equation.php

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You need to further specify your question. The Diffie-Hellmann Key Exchange Protocol is used to establish a secret key over a public channel. After the protocol run, both Alice and Bob have the same key $k_{ab}=A^b=B^a=g^{ab}$.

The El-Gamal system is based on asymmetric cryptography and therefore public keys and secret keys are required. Since the El-Gamal ciphertext consists of two parts $c=(c_1,c_2)$ your description of the decryption function seems to be mixed up. Have a look at the decryption formula of El-Gamal and try to calculate it step by step to understand how the cipher works.

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  • $\begingroup$ What confuses me is that I am given a decimal value for the ciphertext (C) in the exercise I have to solve. I don't know how to split that into c1 and c2. $\endgroup$
    – Kate
    Commented Mar 19, 2017 at 18:17
  • $\begingroup$ @Kate If $C$ has double the length of the other values, there is only one valid way to split it (since both $c_1$ and $c_2$ need to be smaller than the modulus). If it's not, then it is a just a guessing game and you should point that out. "Guess the encoding" is not a cryptographic task. And to make it more blunt: That's just security through obscurity, and should definately not be taught in any cryptography class. Or it was just a mistake. $\endgroup$
    – tylo
    Commented May 17, 2017 at 7:43

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