MathSciDoc: An Archive for Mathematician ∫

MutantXL is an algorithm for solving systems of polynomial equations that was proposed at SCC 2008. This paper proposes two substantial improvements to this algorithm over GF(2) that result in significantly reduced memory usage. We present experimental results comparing MXL2 to the XL algorithm, the MutantXL algorithm and Magma’s implementation of F_4. For this comparison we have chosen small, randomly generated instances of the MQ problem and quadratic systems derived from HFE instances. In both cases, the largest matrices produced by MXL2 are substantially smaller than the ones produced by MutantXL and XL. Moreover, for a significant number of cases we even see a reduction of the size of the largest matrix when we compare MXL2 against Magma’s F_4 implementation.

In 1989, Tsujii, Fujioka, and Hirayama proposed a family of multivariate public key cryptosystems, where the public key is given as a set of multivariate rational functions of degree 4. These cryptosystems are constructed via composition of two quadratic rational maps. In this paper, we present the cryptanalysis of this family of cryptosystems. The key point of our attack is to transform a problem of decomposition of two rational maps into a problem of decomposition of two polynomial maps. We develop a new improved 2R decomposition method and other new techniques, which allows us to find an equivalent decomposition of the rational maps to break the system completely. For the example suggested for practical applications, it is very fast to derive an equivalent private key, and it requires only a few seconds on a standard PC.

We explore ideas for speeding up HFE-based signature schemes. In particular, we propose an HFEv^− system with odd characteristic and a secret map of degree 2. Changing the characteristic of the system has a profound effect, which we attempt to explain and also demonstrate through experiment. We discuss known attacks which could possibly topple such systems, especially algebraic attacks. After testing the resilience of these schemes against F4, we suggest parameters that yield acceptable security levels.

In this paper, we study how the algebraic attack on the HFE multivariate public key cryptosystem works if we build an HFE cryptosystem on a finite field whose characteristic is not two. Using some very basic algebraic geometry we argue that when the characteristic is not two the algebraic attack should not be polynomial in the range of the parameters which are used in practical applications. We further support our claims with extensive experiments using the Magma implementation of F_4, which is currently the best publicly available implementation of the Gröbner basis algorithm. We present a new variant of the HFE cryptosystems, where we project the public key of HFE to a space of one dimension lower. This protects the system from the Kipnis-Shamir attack and makes the decryption process avoid multiple candidates for the plaintext. We propose an example for a practical application on GF(11) and suggest a test challenge on GF(7).

TTM (tame transformation method) is a type of multivariate public key cryptosystem. In 2007, the inventor of TTM proposed two new instances of TTM to resist the existing attacks, in particular, the Nie et al attack. The two instances are claimed to achieve a security of 2109 against Nie et al attack. Through computation, we found that the instance II satisfied First Order Linearization Equations. After finding all linearization equations, we can perform a ciphertext-only attack to break it.

The SFLASH signature scheme stood for a decade as the most successful cryptosystem based on multivariate polynomials, before an efficient attack was finally found in 2007. In this paper, we review its recent cryptanalysis and we notice that its weaknesses can all be linked to the fact that the cryptosystem is built on the structure of a large field. As the attack demonstrates, this richer structure can be accessed by an attacker by using the specific symmetry of the core function being used. Then, we investigate the effect of restricting this large field to a purely linear subset and we find that the symmetries exploited by the attack are no longer present. At a purely defensive level, this defines a countermeasure which can be used at a moderate overhead. On the theoretical side, this informs us of limitations of the recent attack and raises interesting remarks about the design itself of multivariate schemes.

This paper presents a time-area efficient hardware architecture for the multivariate signature scheme Rainbow. As a part of this architecture, a high-performance hardware optimized variant of the well-known Gaussian elimination over GF(2^l) and its efficient implementation are presented. The resulting signature generation core of Rainbow requires 63,593 gate equivalents and signs a message in just 804 clock cycles at 67 MHz using AMI 0.35μm CMOS technology. Thus, Rainbow provides significant performance improvements compared to RSA and ECDSA.

A recently proposed class of multivariate Public-Key Cryptosystems, the Rainbow-Like Digital Signature Schemes, in which successive sets of central variables are obtained from previous ones by solving linear equations, seem to lead to efficient schemes (TTS, TRMS, and Rainbow) that perform well on systems of low computational resources. Recently SFLASH (C^{∗−}) was broken by Dubois, Fouque, Shamir, and Stern via a differential attack. In this paper, we exhibit similar algebraic and diffential attacks, that will reduce published Rainbow-like schemes below their security levels. We will also discuss how parameters for Rainbow and TTS schemes should be chosen for practical applications.

This paper summarizes most of the main developments in the cryptanalysis of multivariate cryptosystems and discuss some problems that remain open. A strong emphasis is put on the symbolic computation tools that have been used to achieve these advances.

This paper introduces a new efficient algorithm, called MXL_3, for computing Gröbner bases of zero-dimensional ideals. The MXL_3 is based on XL algorithm, mutant strategy, and a new sufficient condition for a set of polynomials to be a Gröbner basis. We present experimental results comparing the behavior of MXL_3 to F_4 on HFE and random generated instances of the MQ problem. In both cases the first implementation of the MXL_3 algorithm succeeds faster and uses less memory than Magma’s implementation of F_4.