We prove that a random map drawn from any class \mathfrak{C} of polynomial maps from (F_q)^n to (F_q)^{n+r} that is (i) totally random in the affine terms, and (ii) has a negligible chance of being not strongly one-way, provides a secure PRNG (hence a secure stream cipher) for any q. Plausible choices for are semi-sparse (i.e., the affine terms are truly random) systems and other systems that are easy to evaluate from a small (compared to a generic map) number of parameters. To our knowledge, there are no other positive results for provable security of specialized polynomial systems, in particular sparse ones (which are natural candidates to investigate for speed). We can build a family of provably secure stream ciphers a rough implementation of which at the same security level can be more than twice faster than an optimized QUAD (and any other provably secure stream ciphers proposed so far), and uses much less storage. This may also help build faster provably secure hashes. We also examine the effects of recent results on specialization on security, e.g., Aumasson-Meier (ICISC 2007), which precludes Merkle-Damgaard compression using polynomials systems {uniformly very sparse in every degree} from being universally collision-free. We conclude that our ideas are consistent with and complements these new results. We think that we can build secure primitives based on specialized (versus generic) polynomial maps which are more efficient.

Multivariate Cryptography, as one of the main candidates for establishing post-quantum cryptosystems, provides strong, efficient and well-understood digital signature schemes such as UOV, Rainbow, and Gui. While Gui provides very short signatures, it is, for efficiency reasons, restricted to very small finite fields, which makes it hard to scale it to higher levels of security and leads to large key sizes. In this paper we propose a signature scheme called HMFEv (“Hidden Medium Field Equations”), which can be seen as a multivariate version of HFEv. We obtain our scheme by applying the Vinegar Variation to the MultiHFE encryption scheme of Chen et al. We show both theoretically and by experiments that our new scheme is secure against direct and Rank attacks. In contrast to other schemes of the HFE family such as Gui, HMFEv can be defined over arbitrary base fields and therefore is much more efficient in terms of both performance and memory requirements. Our scheme is therefore a good candidate for the upcoming standardization of post-quantum signature schemes.

We give exact formulas for the growth of the ideal Aλ for λ a quadratic element of the algebra of Boolean functions over the Galois field GF(2). That is, we calculate dim A_k λ where A_k is the subspace of elements of degree less than or equal to k. These results clarify some of the assertions made in the article of Yang, Chen and Courtois [22,23] concerning the efficiency of the XL algorithm.

In this paper, we will systematically study who indeed are the hard lattice cases in LLL reduction. The “hard” cases here mean for their special geometric structures, with a comparatively high “failure probability” that LLL can not solve SVP even by using a powerful relaxation factor. We define the perfect lattice as the “Beauty”, which is given by basis of vectors of the same length with the mutual angles of any two vectors to be exactly 60°. Simultaneously the “Beasts” lattice is defined as the lattice close to the Beauty lattice. There is a relatively high probability (e.g. 15.0% in 3 dimensions) that our “Beasts” bases can withstand the exact-arithmetic LLL reduction (relaxation factors δ close to 1), comparing to the probability (corresponding <0.01%) when apply same LLL on random bases from TU Darmstadt SVP Challenge. Our theoretical proof gives us a direct explanation of this phenomenon. Moreover, we give rational Beauty bases of 3 and 8 dimensions, an irrational Beauty bases of general high dimensions. We also give a general way to construct Beasts lattice bases from the Beauty ones. Experimental results show the Beasts bases derived from Beauty can withstand LLL reduction by a stable probability even for high dimensions. Our work in a way gives a simple and direct way to explain how to build a hard lattice in LLL reduction.

A product formula is proved which involves the unitary group generated by a semibounded self-adjoint operator and an orthogonal projection P. It gives a partial answer to the question about existence of the limit which describes quantum Zeno dynamics in the subspace Ran P.