Tseng et al. proposed two efficient authenticated encryption schemes with message linkages for message flows. Hwang et al. (IEICE Trans. Inf. and Syst., Vol. E89-D, No. 4, April 2006) presented a forgery attack against these two schemes and proposed an improvement that they claim resists such attacks. In this paper, we show that the improved authenticated encryption schemes proposed by Hwang et al. are not secure by presenting another message forgery attack against these improved schemes.

Shi-Hui et al. proposed a new public key cryptosystem using ergodic binary matrices. The security of the system is derived from some assumed hard problem based on ergodic matrices over GF(2). In this note, we show that breaking this system, with a security parameter n (public key of length 4n2 bits, secret key of length 2n bits and block length of length n2 bits), is equivalent to solving a set of n4 linear equations over GF(2) which renders this system insecure for practical choices of n.