A polynomial time algorithm for breaking the basic Merkle-Hellman cryptosystem

  • Authors:
  • Adi Shamir

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • SFCS '82 Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 1982

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Abstract

The cryptographic security of the Merkle-Hellman cryptosystem has been a major open problem since 1976. In this paper we show that the basic variant of this cryptosystem, in which the elements of the public key are modular multiples of a superincreasing sequence, is breakable in polynomial time.