On the efficiency of a general attack against the MOBS cryptosystem

Abstract All instances of the semidirect key exchange protocol, a generalisation of the famous Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol, satisfy the so-called telescoping equality; in some cases, this equality has been used to construct an attack. In this report, we present computational evidence suggesting that an instance of the scheme called “MOBS (matrices over bitstrings)” is an example of a scheme where the telescoping equality has too many solutions to be a practically viable means to conduct an attack.