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

  • Authors:
  • A. Shamir

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The Merkle-Hellman cryptosystem is one of the two major public-key cryptosystems proposed so far. It is shown 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.