What's the Apostrophe or single quote of a variable means in cryptography?

Sheldon

6/27/23, 6:56 PM

What's the meaning of Apostrophe over a variable in the context conversations of verification?

Reference number: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jfc/'mender/IEEESP02.pdf

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signature

commitments

modular-arithmetic

message-recovery

kelalaka

6/27/23, 7:39 PM

Err, what specialty are you expecting then the obvious; two conversations that share $C_a$ and $C_b$ and rest are different ( not necessarily).

dave_thompson_085

6/27/23, 11:42 PM

It's not just cryptography; it's common mathematical and scientific notation. See [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(symbol)) and [wolfram](https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Prime.html). Note it's straight, where close-quote and apostrophe are curved in proper typesetting and (even?) Unicode, though ASCII combines them.

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Crypto

poncho

6/27/23, 7:41 PM

What's the meaning of Apostrophe over a variable in the context conversations of verification?

What it means is that it is an independent variable (which is somehow related to the first).

In the context you asked about, we are talking about an exchange that involves six variables. We overhear two separate exchanges with the same protocol, one exchange where we call the six variables $C_a, C_b, c, v, z_a, z_b$; the other exchange which involve the same $C_a, C_b$ identifiers, but the other four may be different. The authors could have decided to call the variables involved with different identifiers, say, $d, u, w_a, w_b$; however that would have been confusing, because it wouldn't be obvious that $c$ and $d$ are in the same logical position in the two exchanges.

Instead, he gave the values in the second exchange related names, $c', v', z'_a, z'_b$; that way, it is clear that, while $c$ and $c'$ are different, they both come from the same place in the respective exchange.

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Score:2

Crypto

Jay

6/28/23, 10:12 AM

It's actually 'prime' instead of apostrophe. It means alternate or secondary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(symbol)

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Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: What's the Apostrophe or single quote of a variable means in cryptography?

TH: เครื่องหมายอัญประกาศเดี่ยวหรือเครื่องหมายอัญประกาศเดี่ยวของตัวแปรหมายถึงอะไรในการเข้ารหัส

RO: Ce înseamnă Apostroful sau ghilimelele simple ale unei variabile în criptografie?

RU: Что означает апостроф или одинарная кавычка переменной в криптографии?

VI: Dấu nháy đơn hoặc trích dẫn đơn của một biến có nghĩa là gì trong mật mã?

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