Paper 2004/242

Combinatorial group theory and public key cryptography

Vladimir Shpilrain and Gabriel Zapata

Abstract

After some excitement generated by recently suggested public key exchange protocols due to Anshel-Anshel-Goldfeld and Ko-Lee et al., it is a prevalent opinion now that the conjugacy search problem is unlikely to provide sufficient level of security if a braid group is used as the platform. In this paper we address the following questions: (1) whether choosing a different group, or a class of groups, can remedy the situation; (2) whether some other ``hard" problem from combinatorial group theory can be used, instead of the conjugacy search problem, in a public key exchange protocol. Another question that we address here, although somewhat vague, is likely to become a focus of the future research in public key cryptography based on symbolic computation: (3) whether one can efficiently disguise an element of a given group (or a semigroup) by using defining relations.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF PS
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords
public-key cryptographycombinatorial cryptography
Contact author(s)
shpil @ groups sci ccny cuny edu
History
2004-09-20: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2004/242
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2004/242,
      author = {Vladimir Shpilrain and Gabriel Zapata},
      title = {Combinatorial group theory and public key cryptography},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2004/242},
      year = {2004},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2004/242}
}
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