F. Dalla Volta

On some block ciphers and imprimitive groups

The group generated by the round functions of a block cipher has been widely investigated. We identify a large class of block ciphers for which this group is easily guaranteed to be primitive. Our class includes the AES cipher and the SERPENT cipher.

On the group generated by the round functions of translation based ciphers over arbitrary finite fields

We define a translation based cipher over an arbitrary finite field, and study the permutation group generated by the round functions of such a cipher. We show that under certain cryptographic assumptions this group is primitive. Moreover, a minor strengthening of our assumptions allows us to prove that such a group is the symmetric or the alternating group; this improves upon a previous result for the case of characteristic two.

The Round Functions of Cryptosystem PGM Generate the Symmetric Group

S. S. Magliveras et al. have described symmetric and public key cryptosystems based on logarithmic signatures (also known as group bases) for finite permutation groups.In this paper we show that if G is a nontrivial finite group which is not cyclic of order a prime, or the square of a prime, then the round (or encryption) functions of these systems, that are the permutations of G induced by the exact-transversal logarithmic signatures (also known as transversal group bases), generate the full symmetric group on G.This answers a question of S. S. Magliveras, D. R. Stinson and Tran van Trung.

Minimally irreducible groups of prime degree

We determine the irreducible subgroups G of GL ( r ,ℂ), where r is prime and all proper subgroups of G are reducible.

Groups that have the same holomorph as a finite perfect group

Abstract We describe the groups that have the same holomorph as a finite perfect group. Our results are complete for centerless groups. When the center is non-trivial, some questions remain open. The peculiarities of the general case are illustrated by a couple of examples that might be of independent interest.