Paper 2018/604
Attack on Kayawood Protocol: Uncloaking Private Keys
Matvei Kotov, Anton Menshov, and Alexander Ushakov
Abstract
We analyze security properties of a two-party key-agreement protocol recently proposed by I. Anshel, D. Atkins, D. Goldfeld, and P. Gunnels, called Kayawood protocol. At the core of the protocol is an action (called E-multiplication) of a braid group on some finite set. The protocol assigns a secret element of a braid group to each party (private key). To disguise those elements, the protocol uses a so-called cloaking method that multiplies private keys on the left and on the right by specially designed elements (stabilizers for E-multiplication). We present a heuristic algorithm that allows a passive eavesdropper to recover Alice's private key by removing cloaking elements. Our attack has 100% success rate on randomly generated instances of the protocol for the originally proposed parameter values and for recent proposals that suggest to insert many cloaking elements at random positions of the private key. Our implementation of the attack is available on GitHub.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Public-key cryptography
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- Kayawood protocolgroup-based cryptographykey agreementalgebraic eraserbraid groupcolored Burau presentationE-multiplicationcloaking problem
- Contact author(s)
- menshov a v @ gmail com
- History
- 2019-04-26: revised
- 2018-06-18: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2018/604
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/604,
author = {Matvei Kotov and Anton Menshov and Alexander Ushakov},
title = {Attack on Kayawood Protocol: Uncloaking Private Keys},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/604},
year = {2018},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/604}
}
