Polynomial interpolation of cryptographic functions related to Diffie-Hellman and discrete logarithm problem

Recently, the first author introduced some cryptographic functions closely related to the Diffie-Hellman problem called P-Diffie-Hellman functions. We show that the existence of a low-degree polynomial representing a P-Diffie-Hellman function on a large set would lead to an efficient algorithm for solving the Diffie-Hellman problem. Motivated by this result we prove lower bounds on the degree of such interpolation polynomials. Analogously, we introduce a class of functions related to the discrete logarithm and show similar reduction and interpolation results. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.