Paper 2023/1299

A New RSA Variant Based on Elliptic Curves

Abstract

We propose a new scheme based on ephemeral elliptic curves over the ring $\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$ where $n=pq$ is an RSA modulus with $p=u_p^2+v_p^2$, $q=u_q^2+v_q^2$, $u_p\equiv u_q\equiv 3\pmod 4$. The new scheme is a variant of both the RSA and the KMOV cryptosystems. The scheme can be used for both signature and encryption. We study the security of the new scheme and show that is immune against factorization attacks, discrete logarithm problem attacks, sum of two squares attacks, sum of four squares attacks, isomorphism attacks, and homomorphism attacks. Moreover, we show that the private exponents can be much smaller than the ordinary exponents for RSA and KMOV, which makes the decryption phase in the new scheme more efficient.