Note: Shared Key Recovery Attack on Cascader Key Exchange Protocol

Nick Aquina; Simon Rommel; Idelfonso Tafur Monroy

Paper 2025/1418

Note: Shared Key Recovery Attack on Cascader Key Exchange Protocol

Nick Aquina

Simon Rommel

, Eindhoven University of Technology

Idelfonso Tafur Monroy

, Eindhoven University of Technology

Abstract

Cascader has been introduced as a new key exchange protocol based on iterative multiplicative recurrence. This short note presents a practical shared key recovery attack on the Cascader key exchange protocol. This note also shows that Cascader as a hash function is not collision resistant, presents a new upper bound on the output space of Cascader and shows that a Cascader-based KDF is not secure against an Adaptive Chosen Public Inputs Attack (CPM).

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: Cascader key exchange protocol
Contact author(s): n aquina @ tue nl
s rommel @ tue nl
i tafur monroy @ tue nl
History: 2025-08-04: approved; 2025-08-04: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/1418
License: CC BY-SA

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1418,
      author = {Nick Aquina and Simon Rommel and Idelfonso Tafur Monroy},
      title = {Note: Shared Key Recovery Attack on Cascader Key Exchange Protocol},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1418},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1418}
}