Efficient Key Recovery for All HFE Signature Variants

Chengdong Tao, Albrecht Petzoldt, Jintai Ding*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book or Report/Conference proceedingConference Proceedingpeer-review

22 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The HFE cryptosystem is one of the most popular multi- variate schemes. Especially in the area of digital signatures, the HFEv- variant offers short signatures and high performance. Recently, an instance of the HFEv- signature scheme called GeMSS was selected as one of the alternative candidates for signature schemes in the third round of the NIST Post-Quantum Crypto (PQC) Standardization Project. In this paper, we propose a new key recovery attack on the HFEv- signature scheme. Our attack shows that both the Minus and the Vinegar modification do not enhance the security of the basic HFE scheme significantly. This shows that it is very difficult to build a secure and efficient signature scheme on the basis of HFE. In particular, we use our attack to show that the proposed parameters of the GeMSS scheme are not as secure as claimed.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2021 - 41st Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2021, Proceedings
EditorsTal Malkin, Chris Peikert
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages70-93
Number of pages24
ISBN (Print)9783030842413
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event41st Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 16 Aug 202120 Aug 2021

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12825 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference41st Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period16/08/2120/08/21

Keywords

  • HFEv-
  • Key recovery
  • MinRank
  • Multivariate cryptography
  • NIST standardization process

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