After the Kotov-Ushakov attack on the tropical implementation of Stickel protocol, various attempts have been made to create a secure variant of such implementation. Some of these attempts used a special class of commuting matrices resembling tropical circulants, and they have been proposed with claims of resilience against the Kotov-Ushakov attack, and even being potential post-quantum candidates. This paper, however, reveals that a form of the Kotov-Ushakov attack remains applicable and, moreover,...

A real matrix $A$ is a G-matrix if $A$ is nonsingular and there exist nonsingular diagonal matrices $D_1$ and $D_2$ such that $A^{-\mathrm{T}}=D_{1}A{D}_2$, where $A^{-\mathrm{T}}$ denotes the transpose of the inverse of $A$. Denote by $J=\mathrm{diag}(\pm 1)$ a diagonal (signature) matrix, each of whose diagonal entries is $+1$ or $-1$. A nonsingular real matrix $Q$ is called $J$-orthogonal if $Q^{\mathrm{T}}JQ=J$. Many connections are established between these matrices. In particular, a matrix $A$ is a G-matrix if and only if $A$ is diagonally (with positive diagonals) equivalent to a column permutation of...