1. Introduction
Internet and network applications have become the basic necessity of the modern world. Cryptography techniques provide security for these applications. Cryptography is the deliberate attempt to scramble information so that adversaries fail to access secret data. Symmetric cryptography mainly focuses on private-key encryption. The key-distribution and key-management problems make it futile for today’s world. A new approach is required to overcome these problems. Asymmetric cryptography provides a solution. Moreover, it gives a new direction to cryptography. The idea of key exchange protocol was initiated by Merkle, Differ, and Hellman [
1] in the mid-1970s. One of the earliest asymmetric cryptosystems is the famous RSA. Later on, many more asymmetric algorithms were introduced, such as ElGamal and ECC [
2,
3], which were based on the complexity of the integer factorization problem. It was further modified by different cryptologists in [
4,
5,
6]. The elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) has been a prominently researched area, still under the analysis of many cryptographers [
7,
8].
Data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity are the fundamental protection goals of cryptography. Hash functions and digital signatures improve message integrity and make it more authentic [
9,
10]. Nowadays, a critical problem that classical and modern cryptography fails to address is long term security. Quantum cryptography can resolve this problem as it is based on the law of quantum physics, which is valid forever [
11,
12]. The complexity of the quantum algorithm makes it difficult to be implemented in various applications. In this respect, asymmetric cryptosystems based on matrix algebra over residue ring have been studied for the last decade.
The main focus of this work is to ensure an improvement in Khan et al.’s [
13] proposed scheme, based on a commutative subgroup of the
. Our goal is to increase the security of the algorithms by using a unique algebraic structure of the local chain ring
and generalizing both the cryptosystems given in [
13]. However, the local ring
of integer modulo
makes both cryptosystems insecure in the sense that an attacker that is efficient in solving linear equations in
can easily break both schemes in a very limited period. In 2016, Jianwei Jia et al.’s [
14] worked on schemes given in [
13]; they conducted a detailed analysis of structural attack and deduced that both cryptosystems were breakable. In this article, we propose new asymmetric cryptosystems that are based on the abelian subgroup of the general linear group
as done for Cryptosystem 1 over residue ring in [
15]. Chain ring
has a special structure of polynomials; the coefficients of a polynomial are from
which make its calculations easy but unfeasible for the attacker to decrypt it.
The rest of the article comprises as follows. In
Section 2, we briefly define the chain ring. The details of the proposed scheme are given in
Section 3, and then it is verified with an example in
Section 4. Finally, some attacks are discussed in the security analysis in
Section 5, and a conclusion is drawn in the end.
2. Chain Ring
Chain ring is a commutative ring, with identity having the property that under inclusion, each of its ideals forms a chain. More precisely, it is a finite local ring with radical of as a principal ideal. Roughly speaking, it is an extension over the Galois ring where such that is a prime, , and is a basic irreducible polynomial of degree . The cardinality of the Galois ring is Now, if is a maximal ideal of then is residue field which is the Galois extension field .
The finite chain ring is quotient ring
, where
is Euclidean domain and
, whereas one of the special class of finite chain ring is quotient ring
The cardinality of
is
. Elements of this class of chain ring are invertible if the sum of the coefficient of the element
is non-zero, i.e.,
where
. The group of invertible elements of
is denoted as
. In particular, take
so the finite chain ring will be
where
. The number of elements in this chain ring and its unit elements is
3. Proposed Cryptosystems
In the proposed asymmetric cryptosystems, the subgroup of is the aim of the study, while in the original cryptosystems, the subgroup of was under discussion. Hence, the proposed algorithm is a generalization of original cryptosystems, while the finite chain ring is used instead of a residue ring. We will discover later that this modification increases in the computational complexity of the proposed cryptosystem.
Let be the subgroup of . It can be easily proved that is an abelian subgroup of .
Proposition 1. be the ring of matrices andits general linear group. Then,is an abelian subgroup of. Proof of Proposition 1. Since therefore, implies .
Let
, and
. Then,
Since therefore
Hence it is proved that is an abelian subgroup of . □
The probability
that any matrix
but does not exist in
is
The following is the main scheme proposed in this article. Now we discuss Cryptosystems 1 and 2 in detail.
Cryptsystem 1
Key Generation
1. Choose fixed prime number and random number such that
2. Select random elements .
3. Construct two matrices from these elements, such that . If either matrix is not in then repeat Step 2.
4. Define
two commutative inner product automorphisms of
.
5. Compute another automorphism of
by taking the composition of the above two automorphisms,
Since
commute, therefore
also commute, and we have
Choose a random matrix such that does not belong to , and then calculate public key and the private key .
Encryption
1. Choose the plaintext
2. Now for each choose a unique random matrix .
3. Define commutative inner product automorphism .
4. Calculate matrices and
5. Choose a random unit element
and calculate the ciphertext,
Decryption
Compute the plaintext matrix .
Cryptsystem 2
Key Generation
1. Choose fixed prime number and a random number such that , .
2. Select any random matrix such that .
3. Now compute the matrices
4. Choose a random matrix Define two commutative inner product automorphisms of
5. Define other automorphisms
,
Since
commute, therefore
also commute, and we have
Calculate the public key and the private key .
Encryption
1. Choose the plaintext
2. Now for each , choose an arbitrary integer , such that
3. Define automorphism
4. Calculate the matrices
5. Choose a random unit element
and calculate the ciphertext
Decryption
Compute the plaintext matrix .
4. Illustration
Cryptsystem 1
Key generation
1. Select random integer , and fixed number such that .
2. Choose random elements (diagonal entries of upper triangular matrices ) and (rest of entries of matrices).
3. Now the matrices
.
4. Define two inner product automorphisms
of
,
5. Now define other automorphisms
of
,
6. Select a random invertible matrix
T ,
7. Calculate the matrices,
8. The public key is and the private key is .
Encryption
1. Choose the plaintext
2. For each plaintext , choose a unique matrix
4. Calculate
5. Now choose a unit element
and calculate the ciphertext
Decryption
Compute the plaintext matrix
Cryptosystem 2
Key generation
1. Select a random number and fixed number such that .
2. Choose a random matrix
such that
.
4. Choose a random invertible matrix
T .
5. Define
inner product automorphisms of
as
6. Define other automorphisms
,
8. The public key is and the private key is
Encryption
1. Select the plaintext
2. Select unique random number
for each plaintext
and then compute matrix
,
3. Define automorphism
4. Compute the matrices
5. Now choose a unit element
and calculate the ciphertext
Decryption
1. Compute the plaintext matrix
Theorem 1. The algorithm of Cryptosystems 1 and 2 are accurate.
Proof of Theorem 1. Since automorphisms in the proposed cryptosystems remain the same, so its proof is similar to the original scheme. The commutative inner automorphisms are defined in this article
, and another automorphism of
by taking the composition of above two automorphisms
Since
commute, therefore
also commute, and we have
□
Now, we illustrate the comparison of proposed and original schemes in
Table 1. This demonstrates that we compute different public keys from the same private keys in both algebraic structures. Further detail is given in the security analysis section. (Note that we can convert elements from
to
and vice versa).