Paper 2017/1160

A Practical Cryptanalysis of WalnutDSA

Daniel Hart and DoHoon Kim and Giacomo Micheli and Guillermo Pascual Perez and Christophe Petit and Yuxuan Quek

Abstract

We present a practical cryptanalysis of WalnutDSA, a digital signature algorithm trademarked by SecureRF. WalnutDSA uses techniques from permutation groups, matrix groups, and braid groups, and is designed to provide post-quantum security in lightweight IoT device contexts. The attack given in this paper bypasses the E-Multiplication and cloaked conjugacy search problems at the heart of the algorithm and forges signatures for arbitrary messages in approximately two minutes. We also discuss potential countermeasures to the attack.