Cryptanalytic results on knapsack cryptosystem using binary particle swarm optimization

Abstract

The security of most Public Key Cryptosystem (PKC) proposed in literature relies on the difficulty of the integer factorization problem or discrete logarithm problem. However, using shor’s [19] algorithm the problems can be solved in acceptable amount of time via ‘quantum computers’. Therefore in this context knapsack (more accurately subset sum problem(SSP)) based PKC is reconsidered as a viable option by the cryptography community. However, before considering the practicability of this cryptosystem, there is a growing need to cryptanalyze it using all possible present techniques, in order to guarantee their security. We believe that modern Computation Intelligence (CI) techniques can provide efficient cryptanalytic results (because of the new aspects have been incorporated in CI techniques). In this paper, we use two different binary particle swarm optimization techniques to cryptanalyze knapsack PKC. The results obtained via extensive testing are promising and proficient. We present, discuss and compare the effectiveness of the proposed work in the result section. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.