Hierarchical management scheme by local fields (Q546281)

A hierarchical system is essentially a tree whose vertices correspond to participants: ancestors are superiors and descendants are inferiors. The tree root is the supremum of the system. Any superior participant knows the private information of all its inferiors, hence he/she can communicate securely with them; any inferior is able to communicate securely with any superior but is unable to recover his/her private information; and non-subordinated pairs are able to communicate securely only by the consent of a common superior. The authors introduce a cryptographic scheme based on elliptic curves and field extensions in order to realize a hierarchical system. The hierarchical system is put in correspondence with a tree of local field extensions of finite degree of the \(p\)-adic number field \(\mathbb Q_2\) (with \(p=2\)): any pair parent-child in this tree is a field extension of degree 2. A Weierstrass equation is admissible for the scheme whenever the elliptic curves that it defines along any branch in the extension field tree keeps hard the Discrete Logarithm problem. The field tree consists of the intermediate fields between a field \(\mathbb K_1\) and a finite-degree extension \(\mathbb K_2\). A maximal unramified extension \(\mathbb K_0\) of \(\mathbb Q_2\) is built first, and \(\mathbb K_1\) is a wildly ramified extension of \(\mathbb K_0\). The authors show conditions warranting enough intermediate fields for the hierarchical system. The secret information for each participant consists of primitive roots of units, their logarithms with respect to a public generator, base points of elliptic curves and private keys for a variant of the ElGamal ciphering scheme for elliptic curves. The base points can be calculated through compositional properties of the elliptic curves' trace maps. However, any participant should provide a list of private keys for all its inferior participants. The proposed scheme is rather strong and robust. But it seems to be impractical due to the vast information that each node should possess. If for practical purposes the size of the system is limited, then it loses interest in ``real life contexts''. The authors also discuss some procedures in order to calculate exact arithmetic in the primitive \(p\)-adic number field and its extensions. There appear bright mathematical ideas, but notation and discussions are awful and confusing. For instance, on page 163 the symbol \(F\) is used to denote a generic polynomial and also the top field extension at a field lattice, and on page 165 the authors write ``transforms'' when most probably ``transports'' (or a synonym) is meant.