Cryptanalysis of Merkle-Hellman cipher using parallel genetic algorithm

• Main Authors: Kantour, Nedjmeeddine, Bouroubi, Sadek
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 13-11-2017
• Subjects: Computer Science - Cryptography and Security; Computer Science - Information Theory; Mathematics - Information Theory
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1711.04642

In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman introduced the public key
cryptography or asymmetric cryptography standards. Two years later, an
asymmetric cryptosystem was published by Ralph Merkle and Martin Hellman called
MH, based on a variant of knapsack problem known as the subset-sum problem
which is proven to be NP-hard. Furthermore, over the last four decades,
Metaheuristics have achieved a remarkable progress in solving NP-hard
optimization problems. However, the conception of these methods raises several
challenges, mainly the adaptation and the parameters setting. In this paper, we
propose a Parallel Genetic Algorithm (PGA) adapted to explore effectively the
search space of considerable size in order to break the MH cipher. Experimental
study is included, showing the performance of the proposed attacking scheme and
finally concluding with a comparison with the LLL algorithm attack.