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Solving Low Density Knapsacks

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Advances in Cryptology

Abstract

Let al,...,an and s be a set of integers. The knapsack (or subset sum) problem is to find a 0–1 vector (εl,...,εn) such that Σ εiai = s or to show that such a vector does not exist. The integers al,...,an are sometimes referred to as weights. The general knapsack problem is known to be NP complete [5,6]. Several cryptosystems based on the knapsack problem have been designed [9,12,16]. In April, 1982, Adi Shamir [14] announced a method for breaking the Merkle-Hellman cryptosystem. Since that time there has been a flurry of activity to extend his results to include all of the proposed knapsack based cryptosystems [1,2,3,7,13].

This work performed at Sandia National Laboratories supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC04-76DP00789.

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References

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© 1984 Plenum Press, New York

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Brickell, E.F. (1984). Solving Low Density Knapsacks. In: Chaum, D. (eds) Advances in Cryptology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4730-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4730-9_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4684-4732-3

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