A Tamed Transformation Method (TTM) cryptosystem was proposed by T.T.Moh in 1999. We describe how the first implementation scheme of the TTM system can be defeated. The computational complexity of our attack is 2^{33} computations on the finite field with 2^8 elements.

We show all the existing TTM implementation schemes have a defect that there exist linearization equations \sum_{i=1,j=1}^{n,m} a_{ij} x_i y_j(x_1,...,x_n) + \sum_{i=1}^n b_i x_i + \sum_{j=1}^m c_j y_j(x_1,...,x_n) + d = 0, which are satisfied by the components y_i(x_1,...,x_n) of the ciphers of the TTM schemes. We further demonstrate that, for the case of the most recent two implementation schemes in two versions of the paper \cite{CM}, where the inventor of TTM used them to refute a claim in \cite{CG}, if we do a linear substitution with the linear equations derived from the linearization equations for a given ciphertext, we can find the plaintext easily by an iteration of the procedure of first search for linear equations by linear combinations and then linear substitution. The computation complexity of the attack on these two schemes is less than 2^{35} over a finite field of size 2^8.

In a (t,n) threshold scheme any t or more shares can reconstruct the secret s, but less than t shares reveal no information about s. However, an unauthenticated adversary can pretend to be the shareholder at the reconstruction stage. If there were more than t honest shareholders, the unauthenticated adversary without valid share can obtain the secret. To deal with this type of attacks, a model of (t,m,n) group oriented secret sharing (GOSS) scheme was proposed by Miao et al. in 2015. Here the group oriented property means that if m>t parties try to reconstruct the secret, they should all have the authentic shares in advance. It was claimed by Miao et al. that the group oriented property in their GOSS schemes holds in the information-theoretic sense. In this paper, we revisit two instantiations of (t,m,n) group oriented secret sharing schemes and show that these constructions cannot provide the so-called “group oriented property”. Specifically, we develop concrete attacks which allow an unauthenticated adversary with no valid share to participate in the reconstruction phase and obtain the secret provided that there are at least t honest shares presented at the reconstruction phase.

Multivariate public key cryptography is a candidate for post-quantum cryptography, and it allows generating particularly short signatures and fast verification. The Rainbow signature scheme proposed by Ding and Schmidt is such a multivariate cryptosystem, and it is considered secure against all known attacks. The Rainbow-Band-Separation attack recovers a secret key of Rainbow by solving certain systems of quadratic equations, and its complexity is estimated by the well-known theoretical value called the degree of regularity. However, the degree of regularity is generally larger than the solving degree in experiments, and an accurate estimation cannot be obtained. In this article, we propose a new theoretical value for the complexity of the Rainbow-Band-Separation attack using a Gröbner basis algorithm, which provides a more precise estimation compared to that using the degree of regularity. This theoretical value is deduced by the two-variable power series \frac{\prod_{i=1}^m (1 - t_1^{d_{i1}} t_2^{d_{i2}})}{(1-t_1)^{n_1} (1-t_2)^{n_2}}. Since the two-variable power series coincides with the one-variable power series at t_1=t_2 deriving the degree of regularity, the theoretical value is less than or equal to the degree of regularity under a certain condition. Moreover, we show a relation between the Rainbow-Band-Separation attack using the hybrid approach and the HighRank attack. By considering this relation and our theoretical value, we obtain a new complexity estimation for the Rainbow-Band-Separation attack. Furthermore, applying our theoretical value to the complexity formula used in the NIST PQC 2nd round, we show that a slight modification of the proposed Rainbow parameter sets is required. Consequently, we provide a new theoretical value for generally estimating the solving degree of a bi-graded polynomial system, which can influence the parameter selection of Rainbow in the NIST PQC standardization project.

Research on key mismatch attacks against lattice-based KEMs is an important part of the cryptographic assessment of the ongoing NIST standardization of post-quantum cryptography. There have been a number of these attacks to date. However, a unified method to evaluate these KEMs’ resilience under key mismatch attacks is still missing. Since the key index of efficiency is the number of queries needed to successfully mount such an attack, in this paper, we propose and develop a systematic approach to find lower bounds on the minimum average number of queries needed for such attacks. Our basic idea is to transform the problem of finding the lower bound of queries into finding an optimal binary recovery tree (BRT), where the computations of the lower bounds become essentially the computations of a certain Shannon entropy. The optimal BRT approach also enables us to understand why, for some lattice-based NIST candidate KEMs, there is a big gap between the theoretical bounds and bounds observed in practical attacks, in terms of the number of queries needed. This further leads us to propose a generic improvement method for these existing attacks, which are confirmed by our experiments. Moreover, our proposed method could be directly used to improve the side-channel attacks against CCA-secure NIST candidate KEMs.