Christopher Battarbee

Christopher Battarbee, Delaram Kahrobaei, Siamak F. Shahandashti

Of the many families of cryptographic schemes proposed to be post-quantum, a relatively unexplored set of examples comes from group-based cryptography. One of the more central schemes from this area is the so-called Semidirect Product Key Exchange (SDPKE), a generalisation of Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange that is plausibly post-quantum. In this report we survey the state of the literature relating to SDPKE, providing a high-level discussion of security, as well as a comprehensive overview of the proposed platforms and the main cryptanalytic ideas relevant to each.

Christopher Battarbee, Delaram Kahrobaei, Dylan Tailor et al.

All instances of the semidirect key exchange protocol, a generalisation of the famous Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol, satisfy the so-called "telescoping equality"; in some cases, this equality has been used to construct an attack. In this report we present computational evidence suggesting that an instance of the scheme called `MOBS' is an example of a scheme where the telescoping equality has too many solutions to be a practically viable means to conduct an attack.

Christopher Battarbee, Delaram Kahrobaei, Siamak F. Shahandashti

It was recently demonstrated that the Matrix Action Key Exchange (MAKE) algorithm, a new type of key exchange protocol using the semidirect product of matrix groups, is vulnerable to a linear algebraic attack if the matrices are over a commutative ring. In this note, we establish conditions under which protocols using matrices over a non-commutative ring are also vulnerable to this attack. We then demonstrate that group rings $R[G]$ are examples of non-commutative rings that satisfy these conditions.