We explore ideas for speeding up HFE-based signature schemes. In particular, we propose an HFEv^− system with odd characteristic and a secret map of degree 2. Changing the characteristic of the system has a profound effect, which we attempt to explain and also demonstrate through experiment. We discuss known attacks which could possibly topple such systems, especially algebraic attacks. After testing the resilience of these schemes against F4, we suggest parameters that yield acceptable security levels.

In 1989, Tsujii, Fujioka, and Hirayama proposed a family of multivariate public key cryptosystems, where the public key is given as a set of multivariate rational functions of degree 4. These cryptosystems are constructed via composition of two quadratic rational maps. In this paper, we present the cryptanalysis of this family of cryptosystems. The key point of our attack is to transform a problem of decomposition of two rational maps into a problem of decomposition of two polynomial maps. We develop a new improved 2R decomposition method and other new techniques, which allows us to find an equivalent decomposition of the rational maps to break the system completely. For the example suggested for practical applications, it is very fast to derive an equivalent private key, and it requires only a few seconds on a standard PC.

MutantXL is an algorithm for solving systems of polynomial equations that was proposed at SCC 2008. This paper proposes two substantial improvements to this algorithm over GF(2) that result in significantly reduced memory usage. We present experimental results comparing MXL2 to the XL algorithm, the MutantXL algorithm and Magma’s implementation of F_4. For this comparison we have chosen small, randomly generated instances of the MQ problem and quadratic systems derived from HFE instances. In both cases, the largest matrices produced by MXL2 are substantially smaller than the ones produced by MutantXL and XL. Moreover, for a significant number of cases we even see a reduction of the size of the largest matrix when we compare MXL2 against Magma’s F_4 implementation.

SMS4 is a 128-bit block cipher used in the WAPI standard for providing data confidentiality in wireless networks. In this paper we investigate and explain the origin of the S-Box employed by the cipher, show that an embedded cipher similar to BES can be obtained for SMS4 and demonstrate the fragility of the cipher design by giving variants that exhibit 2^{64} weak keys. We also show attacks on reduced round versions of the cipher. The best practical attack we found is an integral attack that works on 10 rounds out of 32 rounds with a complexity of 2^{18} operations; it can be extended to 13 rounds using round key guesses, resulting in a complexity of 2^{114} operations and a data complexity of 2^{16} chosen pairs.

In 2006, the inventors of TRMC public key cryptosystem proposed a new variant of TRMC, TRMC-4, which can resist the existing attack, in particular, the Joux et al attack. In this paper, we show that the new version is vulnerable to attack via the linearization equations (LE) method. For any given valid ciphertext and its corresponding TRMC-4 public key, we can derive the corresponding plaintext within 2^{24} F_{2^8}-operations, after performing once for the public key a computation of complexity less than 2^{34}. Our results are confirmed by computer experiments.