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Factoring Products of Braids via Garside Normal Form

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Public-Key Cryptography – PKC 2019 (PKC 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11443))

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Abstract

Braid groups are infinite non-abelian groups naturally arising from geometric braids. For two decades they have been proposed for cryptographic use. In braid group cryptography public braids often contain secret braids as factors and it is hoped that rewriting the product of braid words hides individual factors. We provide experimental evidence that this is in general not the case and argue that under certain conditions parts of the Garside normal form of factors can be found in the Garside normal form of their product. This observation can be exploited to decompose products of braids of the form ABC when only B is known.

Our decomposition algorithm yields a universal forgery attack on WalnutDSATM, which is one of the 20 proposed signature schemes that are being considered by NIST for standardization of quantum-resistant public-key cryptography. Our attack on WalnutDSATM can universally forge signatures within seconds for both the 128-bit and 256-bit security level, given one random message-signature pair. The attack worked on 99.8% and 100% of signatures for the 128-bit and 256-bit security levels in our experiments.

Furthermore, we show that the decomposition algorithm can be used to solve instances of the conjugacy search problem and decomposition search problem in braid groups. These problems are at the heart of other cryptographic schemes based on braid groups.

The full version can be found in the IACR eprint archive as article 2018/1142.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Ward Beullens and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. This work was produced as part of a master’s thesis of the first author at the University of Oxford. He is now supported by the EPSRC as part of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security at Royal Holloway, University of London (EP/P009301/1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

    Simon-Philipp Merz

  2. University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Christophe Petit

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  1. Simon-Philipp Merz
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Correspondence to Simon-Philipp Merz .

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  1. Institute of Information Engineering, SKLOIS, Beijing, China

    Dongdai Lin

  2. NEC Corporation, Kawasaki, Japan

    Kazue Sako

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Merz, SP., Petit, C. (2019). Factoring Products of Braids via Garside Normal Form. In: Lin, D., Sako, K. (eds) Public-Key Cryptography – PKC 2019. PKC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11443. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17259-6_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17259-6_22

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