A knapsack-based probabilistic encryption scheme

Abstract

Knapsack-based cryptosystems had been viewed as the most attractive and the most promising asymmetric cryptographic algorithms for a long time due to their NP-completeness nature and high speed in encryption/decryption. Unfortunately, most of them are broken for the low-density feature of the underlying knapsack problems. In this paper, we investigate a new easy compact knapsack problem and propose a novel knapsack-based probabilistic public-key cryptosystem in which the cipher-text is non-linear with the plaintext. For properly chosen parameters, the underlying knapsack problem enjoys a high density larger than 1.06 in the worst case. Hence, it is secure against the low-density subset-sum attacks. Our scheme can also defeat other potential attacks such as the brute force attacks and the simultaneous Diophantine approximation attack. Compared with previous knapsack-based cryptosystems, our scheme is efficient and practical.