Paper 2008/498

Small Odd Prime Field Multivariate PKCs

Anna Chen, Ming-Shing Chen, Tien-Ren Chen, Chen-Mou Cheng, Jintai Ding, Eric Kuo, Frost Li, and Bo-Yin Yang

Abstract

We show that Multivariate Public Key Cryptosystems (MPKCs) over fields of small odd prime characteristic, say 31, can be highly efficient. Indeed, at the same design security of $2^{80}$ under the best known attacks, odd-char MPKC is generally faster than prior MPKCs over \GF{2^k}, which are in turn faster than ``traditional'' alternatives. This seemingly counter-intuitive feat is accomplished by exploiting the comparative over-abundance of small integer arithmetic resources in commodity hardware, here embodied by SSE2 or more advanced special multimedia instructions on modern x86-compatible CPUs. We explain our implementation techniques and design choices in implementing our chosen MPKC instances modulo small a odd prime. The same techniques are also applicable in modern FPGAs which often contains a large number of multipliers.