Asymmetric Cryptography Based on the Tropical Jones Matrix

Abstract

In recent years, the tropical polynomial factorization problem, the tropical matrix decomposition problem, and the tropical multivariate quadratic equation solving problem have been proved to be NP-hard. Some asymmetric cryptographic systems based on tropical semirings have been proposed, but most of them are insecure and have been successfully attacked. In this paper, a new key exchange protocol and a new encryption protocol are proposed based on the difficulty of finding the multiple exponentiation problem of the tropical Jones matrices. The analysis results indicate that our protocol can resist various existing attacks. The complexity of attacking an MEP by adversaries is raised due to the larger number of combinations in the tropical Jones matrices compared to regular matrix polynomials. Furthermore, the index semiring is the non-negative integer cyclic matrix semiring, leading to a higher efficiency in key generation.

Keywords

• tropical algebra
• Jones matrix
• cryptography
• key exchange protocol