Cryptanalysis of Stickel's Key Exchange Scheme

We offer cryptanalysis of a key exchange scheme due to Stickel [11], which was inspired by the well-known Diffie-Hellman protocol. We show that Stickel's choice of platform (the group of invertible matrices over a finite field) makes the scheme vulnerable to linear algebra attacks with very high success rate in recovering the shared secret key (100% in our experiments). We also show that obtaining the shared secret key in Stickel's scheme is not harder for the adversary than solving the decomposition search problem in the platform (semi)group.

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