Paper 2003/049

Hidden Number Problem in Small Subgroups

Igor Shparlinski and Arne Winterhof

Abstract

Boneh and Venkatesan have proposed a polynomial time algorithm for recovering a "hidden" element $\alpha \in \F_p$, where $p$ is prime, from rather short strings of the most significant bits of the residue of $\alpha t$ modulo $p$ for several randomly chosen $t\in \F_p$. Gonzälez Vasco and the first author have recently extended this result to subgroups of $\F_p^*$ of order at least $p^{1/3+\varepsilon}$ for all $p$ and to subgroups of order at least $p^\varepsilon$ for almost all $p$. Here we introduce a new modification in the scheme which amplifies the uniformity of distribution of the `multipliers' $t$ and thus extend this result to subgroups of order at least $(\log p)/(\log \log p)^{1-\varepsilon}$ for all primes $p$. As in the above works, we give applications of our result to the bit security of the Diffie--Hellman secret key starting with subgroups of very small size, thus including all cryptographically interesting subgroups.