Cryptanalysis of Knapsack Cipher Using Ant Colony Optimization

2018

Ant Colony Optimization is a search metaheuristic inspired by the behavior of real ant colonies and shown their effectiveness, robustness to solve a wide variety of complex problems. In this paper, we present a novel Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based attack for cryptanalysis of knapsack cipher algorithm. A Cipher-text only attack is used to discover the plaintext from the cipher-text. Moreover, our approach allows us to break knapsack cryptosystem in a minimum search space when compared with other techniques. Experimental results prove that ACO can be used as an effective tool to attack knapsack cipher.