Semirings as Building Blocks in Cryptography

Book excerpt: Semirings as an algebraic structure have been known since 1934, but remained unapplied for mathematical purposes for a long time. It has only been in the past decade that they have been used in cryptography. The advantage of (additively) idempotent semirings is that the additive operation does not have an inverse, which can help in preventing the breakage of a cryptosystem. This book describes a number of cryptographic protocols, as well as the hard mathematical problems on which their security is based. It will appeal to cryptographers and specialists in applied algebra.