Paper 2000/020

On the Security of Diffie--Hellman Bits

Maria Isabel Gonzalez Vasco and Igor E. Shparlinski

Abstract

Boneh and Venkatesan have recently proposed a polynomial time algorithm for recovering a "hidden" element $\alpha$ of a finite field $\F_p$ of $p$ elements from rather short strings of the most significant bits of the remainder modulo $p$ of $\alpha t$ for several values of $t$ selected uniformly at random from $\F_p^*$. We use some recent bounds of exponential sums to generalize this algorithm to the case when $t$ is selected from a quite small subgroup of $\F_p^*$. Namely, our results apply to subgroups of size at least $p^{1/3+ \varepsilon}$ for all primes $p$ and to subgroups of size at least $p^{\varepsilon}$ for almost all primes $p$, for any fixed $\varepsilon >0$. We also use this generalization to improve (and correct) one of the statements of the aforementioned work about the computational security of the most significant bits of the Diffie--Hellman key.