Abstract
About twenty years ago, a combinatorial cryptosystem called the Merkle-Hellman Knapsack met with a great deal of enthusiastic acclaim [Hellman and Merkle 1978]. For message transmission it was much more efficient than its main competitor at the time, which was RSA. Moreover, it was thought to be almost provably secure. Whereas the security of RSA is based on the difficulty of factoring large integers, that of Merkle-Hellman is based on the conjecturally more difficult Subset Sum problem, which is known to be NP-complete (see Definition 4.6 of Chapter 2).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Koblitz, N. (1998). Combinatorial-Algebraic Cryptosystems. In: Algebraic Aspects of Cryptography. Algorithms and Computation in Mathematics, vol 3. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03642-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03642-6_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-08332-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-03642-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive