Zero-Knowledge Made Easy so It Won’t Make You Dizzy

For any research paper, as all the authors know

An abstract is required to keep the proper flow

An abstract is a lure that must be appetizing

It’s typically stuffed with shameless aggrandizing

Which brings us to the subject of our seminal result

Its impact on the Zeitgeist will alter the Gestalt

This noble work is prompted by dominance of prose

The reason crypto papers make readers comatose

This paper makes an effort to change the status quo

By showing that crypto poetry is another way to go

1. 1.

   And if you’re a godless atheist

   Assume that p was picked by NIST

Authors and Affiliations

1. Carpe Diem Consulting, Irvine, CA, USA

   Trotta Gnam

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Trotta Gnam .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA

   Vassilis Zikas

2. University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

   Roberto De Prisco

Appendix A: A Poetical Revenge on Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

1.1 1. Introduction and Motivation

Teaching cryptography can be so boring

That one can hear students snoring

To verify this claim and see

Try introducing them to public key

Before we delve into this lecture

We need to first make a conjecture

Perhaps the boredom is caused

By dominance of sleep-inducing prose

We thus attempt to keep the audience alert

By rhymes to which we protocols convert

We start with Diffie-Hellman protocol [4]

Which is by far the simplest one of all

In this description, it isn’t very terse

Since it’s presented entirely in verse

NOTE: As we forward bravely plow

The rhyming tempo changes now

1.2 2. The Protocol

Before our Earth was ever trod

A large prime p was picked by God^{Footnote 1}

NOTE: In the protocol you’ll see

All computations are mod p

Then, a generator g was chosen

And thereafter both were frozen

Alice – one of fairer sex

Computes g to random X

Bob – a sketchy kind of guy

Raises g to chosen Y

Clock synchronization loose

They exchange the residues

Not to spoil all the fun \(\ldots \)

But, that’s the end of round one

Alice, with her secret, next

Raises g \(^Y\) to the X

Feeling just a little high

Bob computes g \(^X\) to the Y

Now for both the time is ripe

To bootstrap a secure pipe

1.3 3. Correctness

To see that Diffie-Hellman works

Even between two total dorks

Consider that both Bob and Alice

Wind up computing equal values

1.4 4. Security

A passive eavesdropper can see

How they obtain the shared key

But even best computing toys

Can’t help distinguish it from noise

Alas this claim’s no longer true

When adversary changes hue

When Eve adopts an active role

We’re left with a broken protocol

She distracts Alice by playing fiddle

While fooling Bob with man-in-the-middle

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