Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2021/050

The Distinguishing Attack on HFE

Joshua Deaton and Jintai Ding

Abstract: Often times, the ability to distinguish between random data and a public key can leads to an attack against the cryptosystem itself. In this paper, we will show experimentally a very efficient distinguisher based on the distribution of ranks of the symmetric matrices associated with the central map in the multivariate cryptosystem HFE when the degree D of the central map is very small.

Category / Keywords: public-key cryptography / HFE Distinguish Cryptography Experimental

Date: received 13 Jan 2021

Contact author: jdeaton1995 at gmail com

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20210118:081537 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2021/050