Non-Commutative Key Exchange Protocol

We introduce a novel key exchange protocol based on non-commutative matrix multiplication. The security of our method does not rely on computational problems as integer factorization or discrete logarithm whose difficulty is conjectured. We claim that the unique opportunity for the eavesdropper to get the private key is by means of an exhaustive search which is equivalent to searching an unsorted database problem. Therefore, the algorithm becomes a promising candidate to be used in the quantum era to establish shared keys and achieve secret communication. Furthermore, to establish a 256-bit secret key the size of the public key only requires 256 bits while the private key occupies just 384 bits. Matrix multiplications can be done over a reduced 4-bit size modulo. Also, we show that in a generalized method, private numbers become indistinguishable and we discuss how to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). As a consequence, Lizama's protocol becomes a promising alternative for Internet-of-Things (IoT) computational devices in the quantum era.