On the Security of Stickel’s Key Exchange Scheme

Michal Sramka1
1Center for Cryptology and Information Security, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431

Abstract

E. Stickel proposed a variation of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme based on non-abelian groups, claiming that the underlying problem is more secure than the traditional discrete logarithm problem in cyclic groups. We show that the proposed scheme does not provide a higher level of security in comparison to the traditional Diffie-Hellman scheme.