Forging tropical signatures

ePrint Report: Forging tropical signatures

Lorenz Panny

A recent preprint [ePrint 2023/1475] suggests the use of polynomials over a tropical algebra to construct a digital signature scheme "based on" the problem of factoring such polynomials, which is known to be NP‑hard.
This short note presents two very efficient forgery attacks on the scheme, bypassing the need to factorize tropical polynomials and thus demonstrating that security in fact rests on a different, empirically easier problem.

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