Paper 2010/024

Authentication schemes from actions on graphs, groups, or rings

Dima Grigoriev and Vladimir Shpilrain

Abstract

We propose a couple of general ways of constructing authentication schemes from actions of a semigroup on a set, without exploiting any specific algebraic properties of the set acted upon. Then we give several concrete realizations of this general idea, and in particular, we describe several authentication schemes with long-term private keys where forgery (a.k.a. impersonation) is NP-hard. Computationally hard problems that can be employed in these realizations include Graph Colorability, Diophantine Problem, and many others.