Multivariate Public Key Cryptosystems (MPKCs) are often touted as future-proofing against Quantum Computers. It also has been known for efficiency compared to “traditional” alternatives. However, this advantage seems to erode with the increase of arithmetic resources in modern CPUs and improved algorithms, especially with respect to Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). In this paper, we show that hardware advances do not just favor ECC. Modern commodity CPUs also have many small integer arithmetic/logic resources, embodied by SSE2 or other vector instruction sets, that are useful for MPKCs. In particular, Intel’s SSSE3 instructions can speed up both public and private maps over prior software implementations of Rainbow-type systems up to 4×. Furthermore, MPKCs over fields of relatively small odd prime characteristics can exploit SSE2 instructions, supported by most modern 64-bit Intel and AMD CPUs. For example, Rainbow over F_{31} can be up to 2× faster than prior implementations of similarly-sized systems over F_{16}. Here a key advance is in using Wiedemann (as opposed to Gauss) solvers to invert the small linear systems in the central maps. We explain the techniques and design choices in implementing our chosen MPKC instances over fields such as F_{31}, F_{16} and F_{256}. We believe that our results can easily carry over to modern FPGAs, which often contain a large number of small multipliers, usable by odd-field MPKCs.

Sflash had recently been broken by Dubois, Stern, Shamir, etc., using a differential attack on the public key. The C^{*-} signature schemes are hence no longer practical. In this paper, we will study the new attack from the point view of symmetry, then (1) present a simple concept (projection) to modify several multivariate schemes to resist the new attacks; (2) demonstrate with practical examples that this simple method could work well; and (3) show that the same discussion of attack-and-defence applies to other big-field multivariates. The speed of encryption schemes is not affected, and we can still have a big-field multivariate signatures resisting the new differential attacks with speeds comparable to Sflash.

In this paper, we show that the signal function used in Ring-Learning with Errors (RLWE) key exchange could leak information to find the secret s of a reused public key p = as+2e. This work is motivated by an attack proposed in [1] and gives an insight into how public keys reused for long term in RLWE key exchange protocols can be exploited. This work specifically focuses on the attack on the KE protocol in [2] by initiating multiple sessions with the honest party and analyze the output of the signal function. Experiments have confirmed the success of our attack in recovering the secret.

In this paper, we present an efficient attack on the multivariate Quadratic Quasigroups (MQQ) public key cryptosystem. Our cryptanalysis breaks the MQQ cryptosystem by solving a system of multivariate quadratic polynomial equations using both the MutantXL algorithm and the F4 algorithm. We present the experimental results that show that MQQ systems is broken up to size n equal to 300. Based on these results we show also that MutantXL solves MQQ systems with much less memory than the F4 algorithm implemented in Magma.

Secure Remote Password (SRP) protocol is an augmented Password-based Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocol based on discrete logarithm problem (DLP) with various attractive security features. Compared with basic PAKE protocols, SRP does not require server to store user’s password and user does not send password to server to authenticate. These features are desirable for secure client-server applications. SRP has gained extensive real-world deployment, including Apple iCloud, 1Password etc. However, with the advent of quantum computer and Shor’s algorithm, classic DLP-based public key cryptography algorithms are no longer secure, including SRP. Motivated by importance of SRP and threat from quantum attacks, we propose a RLWE-based SRP protocol (RLWE-SRP) which inherit advantages from SRP and elegant design from RLWE key exchange. We also present parameter choice and efficient portable C++ implementation of RLWE-SRP. Implementation of our 209-bit secure RLWE-SRP is more than 3x faster than 112-bit secure original SRP protocol, 5.5x faster than 80-bit secure J-PAKE and 14x faster than two 184-bit secure RLWE-based PAKE protocols with more desired properties.