At CRYPTO 2003, Rubin and Silverberg introduced the concept of torus-based cryptography over a finite field. The present invention extends their setting to the ring of integers modulo N, thus obtaining compact representations for cryptographic systems that base their security on the discrete logarithm problem and the factoring problem. This can result in small key sizes and substantial savings in memory and bandwidth. However, unlike the case of finite field, analogous trace-based compression methods cannot be adapted to accommodate the extended setting of the invention when the underlying systems require more than a mere exponentiation. The invention finds particular application in a torus-based implementation of the ACJT group signature scheme. Also provided is a processor.