Cryptanalysis of a quadratic compact knapsack public-key cryptosystem

Recently, Wang and Hu have proposed a high-density quadratic compact knapsack public-key cryptosystem using the Chinese remainder theorem to disguise two secret cargo vectors. The system is claimed to be secure against certain known attacks: however, it has not been demonstrated to fulfill any provable security goals. In this work, we show that this system is not secure. Exploiting the special structure of system parameters, we first show that a candidate list for the secret modulus can be obtained by solving linear equations with small solutions. Next, we show that with this candidate list, all other secrets can be recovered in succession with lattice-based methods by solving certain modular linear equations with small solutions. As a result, recovering a private key can be done in about 11 h for the proposed system parameter n = 100. We also discuss a method to thwart the proposed attack. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.