We study relations between the ground-state energy of a quantum graph Hamiltonian with attractive <i></i> coupling at the vertices and the graph geometry. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition under which the energy increases with the increase of graph edge lengths. We show that this is always the case if the graph has no branchings while both energy increase and decrease are possible for graphs with a more complicated topology.

The HFEv- signature scheme is a twenty year old multivariate public key signature scheme. It uses the Minus and the Vinegar modifier on the original HFE scheme. An instance of the HFEv- signature scheme called GeMSS is one of the alternative candidates for signature schemes in the third round of the NIST Post Quantum Crypto (PQC) Standardization Project. In this paper, we propose a new key recovery attack on the HFEv- signature scheme. We show that the Minus modification does not enhance the security of cryptosystems of the HFE family, while the Vinegar modification increases the complexity of our attack only by a polynomial factor. By doing so, we show that the proposed parameters of the GeMSS scheme are not as secure as claimed. Our attack shows that it is very difficult to build a secure and efficient signature scheme on the basis of HFEv-.

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