Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Proof . See [167, Theorem 1.3.3, page 37].
It is easily seen that any common divisor of a,b
Z
is also a common divisor
of an expression of the form ax + by for x,y
. Such an expression is called
a linear combination of a and b . The greatest common divisor is a special kind
of linear combination, which can be computed using a more general form of
Theorem A.3, as follows.
Z
Theorem A.4 ( The Extended Euclidean Algorithm)
Let a,b
, and let q i for i =1 , 2 ,...,n +1 be the quotients obtained from
the application of the Euclidean algorithm to find g = gcd( a,b ) , where n is the
least nonnegative integer such that r n +1 =0 .If s 1 =1 , s 0 =0 , and
N
s i = s i 2
q n i +2 s i 1 ,
for i =1 , 2 ,...,n +1 , then
g = s n +1 a + s n b.
Proof . See [167, Theorem 1.3.4, page 38].
Corollary A.1 If c a and c b , then c ( ax + by ) for any x,y
Z
.In
particular, the least positive value of ax + by is g .
We will also need the following notion (see Exercise 4.28 on page 575 in
Appendix G, for instance).
( The Least Common Multiple )
If a,b
, then the smallest natural number, which is a multiple of both a
and b , is the least common multiple of a and b , denoted by lcm( a,b ).
Z
The Sigma Notation
We can write n =1+1+
+ 1 for the sum of n copies of 1. We use the
Greek letter upper case sigma to denote summation . For instance, i =1 1= n
would be a simpler way of stating the above. Also, instead of writing the sum
of the first one hundred natural numbers as 1 + 2 +
···
···
+ 100, we may write it
as 100
i =1 i . In general, if we have numbers a m ,a m +1 ,
···
,a n ( m
n ), we may
write their sum as
n
···
a i = a m + a m +1 +
a n ,
i = m
and by convention,
n
a i =0if m>n.
i = m
The letter i is the index of summation (and any letter may be used here), n is
the upper limit of summation , m is the lower limit of summation , and a i is a
summand . In the previous example, i =1 1, there is no i in the summand since
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