Paper 2026/1257

Stickel-type key exchange with hidden subspaces

Abstract

We give a witness-finding cryptanalysis of Stickel-type key exchange schemes, which involve two-sided multiplication of $n \times n$ matrices over $\mathbb{F}_p$, where these matrices are drawn from public subspaces with a particular commuting structure. This analysis covers Stickel's original proposal, Shpilrain's polynomial extension of that scheme, Nager's algebraic extension of that scheme, and more generally all Stickel-type approaches using public subspaces over matrix algebra in finite fields: all such schemes can be broken in polynomial time. We also describe a new key establishment scheme using two-sided matrix multiplication in which the commuting subspaces used to form the key are hidden via conjugation by private terms, blocking this specific public-subspace analysis; the witness-finding problem in this new scheme has a direct reduction from a standard NP-hard problem (Edmonds' problem).