A practical attack on some braid group based cryptographic primitives

Abstract

A simple heuristic approach to the conjugacy problem in braid groups is described. Although it does not provide a general solution to the latter problem, it demonstrates that various proposed key parameters for braid group based cryptographic primitives do not offer acceptable cryptographic security. We give experimental evidence that it is often feasible to reveal the secret data by means of a normal PC within a few minutes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.