Merkle-Hellman Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Merkle-Hellman (MH) was one of the earliest public key cryptosystems invented by Ralph Merkle and Martin Hellman in 1978. Although its ideas are elegant, and far simpler than RSA, it has been broken. MH is based on the subset sum problem (a special case of the knapsack problem): given a list of numbers and a third number, which is the sum of a subset of these numbers, determine the subset. In general, this problem is known to be NP-hard; however, there are some 'easy' instances which can be solved efficiently. The Merkle-Hellman is based on transforming an easy instance into a difficult instance, and back again. It was broken by Shamir, not by attacking the knapsack problem, but rather by breaking the conversion from an easy knapsack to a hard one. The algorithm is as follows:

KEY GENERATION - To encrypt n-bit messages, choose a superincreasing sequence

w = (w₁, w₂, ..., w_n)

of n natural numbers (excluding zero). (A superincreasing sequence is a sequence in which every element is greater than the sum of all previous elements.) Pick a random integer q, such that q > w_n, and a random integer r coprime to q. Now calculate the sequence

β = (β₁, β₂, ..., β_n)

where β_i = rw_i (mod q). The public key is β, while the private key is (w, q, r).

ENCRYPTION - To encrypt an n-bit message

α = (α₁, α₂, ..., α_n) ,

where α_i is the i-th bit of the message, calculate

.

The cryptogram then is c.

DECRYPTION - Calculate s = r^-1 (mod q), and c' = c*s (mod q). The knapsack problem (w, c) can be solved in linear time.

See also: public key cryptography.

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