Public key cryptography based on skew dihedral group rings

Abstract: In this paper, we propose to use a skew dihedral group ring given by the group $D_{2n}$ and the finite field $\mathbb{F}{q^2}$ for public-key cryptography. Using the ambient space $\mathbb{F}{q^{2}}^{\theta} D_{2n}$ and a group homomorphism $\theta: D_{2n} \rightarrow \mathrm{Aut}(\mathbb{F}{q^2})$, we introduce a key exchange protocol and present an analysis of its security. Moreover, we explore the properties of the resulting skew group ring $\mathbb{F}{q^{2}}^{\theta} D_{2n}$, exploiting them to enhance our key exchange protocol. We also introduce a probabilistic public-key scheme derived from our key exchange protocol and obtain a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) by applying a well-known generic transformation to our public-key scheme. Finally, we present a proof-of-concept implementation of our cryptographic constructions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that proposes a skew dihedral group ring for public-key cryptography.