Sflash is a fast multivariate signature scheme. Though the first version Sflash-v1 was flawed, a second version, Sflash-v2 was selected by the Nessie Consortium and was recommended for implementation of low-end smart cards. Very recently, due to the security concern, the designer of Sflash recommended that Sflash-v2 should not be used, instead a new version Sflash-v3 is proposed, which essentially only increases the length of the signature. The Sflash family of signature schemes is a variant of the Matsumoto and Imai public key cryptosystem. The modification is through the Minus method, namely given a set of polynomial equations, one takes out a few of them to make them much more difficult to solve. In this paper, we attack the Sflash-v3 scheme by combining an idea from the relinearization method by Kipnis and Shamir, which was used to attack the Hidden Field Equation schemes, and the linearization method by Patarin. We show that the attack complexity is less than 2^{80}, the security standard required by the Nessie Consortium.

We propose a new efficient hardware implementation of Rainbow signature scheme. We enhance the implementation in three directions. First, we develop a new parallel hardware design for the Gauss-Jordan elimination, and solve a 12 ×12 system of linear equations with only 12 clock cycles. Second, a novel multiplier is designed to speed up multiplication of three elements over a finite field. Third, we design a novel partial multiplicative inverter to speed up the multiplicative inversion of finite field elements. Through further other minor optimizations of the parallelization process and by integrating the major optimizations above, we build a new hardware implementation, which takes only 198 clock cycles to generate a Rainbow signature, a new record in generating digital signatures and four times faster than the 804-clock-cycle Balasubramanian-Bogdanov-Carter-Ding-Rupp design with similar parameters.

No abstract uploaded!

No abstract uploaded!

We discuss approximations of the vertex coupling on a star-shaped quantum graph of n edges in the singular case when the wave functions are not continuous at the vertex and no edge-permutation symmetry is present. It is shown that the CheonShigehara technique using interactions with nonlinearly scaled couplings yields a 2n-parameter family of boundary conditions in the sense of norm resolvent topology. Moreover, using graphs with additional edges, one can approximate the {n+1\choose 2}-parameter family of all time-reversal invariant couplings.