Title: Cryptanalysis of an improved MFE public key cryptosystem

Authors: Zhaohu Xu; Xuyun Nie; Hui Wang; Yongjian Liao

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China ' School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China ' School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China ' School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrate Administration Technologies for Information Security, Shanghai 200030, China

Abstract: Medium-Field Multivariate (MFE) Public-Key Encryption Scheme which was proposed by Wang et al. was broken by Ding et al. in 2007 through high order linearisation equation attack. In 2009, Tao et al. gave an improvement of MFE. They claimed that the improved MFE is secure against high order linearisation equation attack. However, through theoretical analysis, we find that there are many second order linearisation equations (SOLEs) satisfied by this improved version. Using linearisation equation attack can break this version.

Keywords: multivariate public key cryptography; algebraic attacks; second order linearisation equations; cryptanalysis; MFE public key cryptosystems; network security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2012.052532

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2012 Vol.7 No.3, pp.174 - 180

Received: 21 Mar 2012
Accepted: 12 Oct 2012
Published online: 10 Mar 2013 *

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