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Algebraic attack on HFE revisited. (English) Zbl 1181.94092

Wu, Tzong-Chen (ed.) et al., Information security. 11th international conference, ISC 2008, Taipei, Taiwan, September 15–18, 2008. Proceedings. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-540-85884-3/pbk). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5222, 215-227 (2008).
Summary: 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).
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1148.68008].

MSC:

94A60 Cryptography

Software:

Magma
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