A Closer Look at the Tropical Cryptography
This work is significant for the cryptography community, as it identifies critical flaws in newly proposed tropical-algebra-based key exchange protocols, preventing their adoption.
This paper analyzes two public key exchange protocols based on tropical algebra. It presents a fast attack that breaks the first protocol and demonstrates that the second protocol is not implementable as described.
We examine two public key exchange protocols proposed recently by Grigoriev and Shpilrain (arXiv:1811.06386), which use tropical algebra. We introduce a fast attack on the first protocol, and we show that the second protocol cannot be implemented as described.