International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Let $N=pq$ be the product of two balanced prime numbers $p$ and $q$. Elkamchouchi, Elshenawy and Shaban presented in 2002 an interesting RSA-like cryptosystem that uses the key equation $ed - k (p^2-1)(q^2-1) = 1$, instead of the classical RSA key equation $ed - k (p-1)(q-1) = 1$. The authors claimed that their scheme is more secure than RSA. Unfortunately, the common attacks developed against RSA can be adapted for Elkamchouchi \emph{et al.}'s scheme. In this paper, we introduce a family of RSA-like encryption schemes that uses the key equation $ed - k (p^n-1)(q^n-1) = 1$, where $n>0$ is an integer. Then, we show that regardless of the choice of $n$, there exists an attack based on continued fractions that recovers the secret exponent.