Subsets of groups in public-key cryptography

Abstract

We suggest the usage of algebraic subsets instead of subgroups in public-key cryptography. In particular, we present the subset version of two protocols introduced by Shpilrain and Ushakov with some examples in ascending HNN-extensions of free-abelian groups and discuss their resistance to length and distance based attacks. We also introduce several new group theoretic problems arising from this work.