Paper 2025/1605

Refined Humbert Invariants in Supersingular Isogeny Degree Analysis

Abstract

We focus on refined Humbert invariants of principally polarized superspecial abelian surfaces, introduced by Kani in 1994. The main contributions are to enumerate principal polarizations on a superspecial surface, and for each polarization, to compute the refined Humbert invariant of a principally polarized superspecial abelian surface. Then, we present several applications of computing this invariant for isogeny-based cryptography. First, we provide a decision algorithm to check if two given polarizations are isomorphic. Second, we present an efficient algorithm to determine the geometric type of a principally polarized superspecial surface. Third, we prove an upper bound on the largest minimal isogeny degree among pairs of supersingular elliptic curves, independent of their endomorphism-ring structures, and our experimental evidence verifies this claim up to $p=659$, $p\equiv 11\pmod{12}$. Fourth, we present experimental evidence for a minimum isogeny frequency within the proven upper bounds. Lastly, we provide a different perspective on the fixed isogeny degree problem using refined Humbert invariants and analyze it without explicit endomorphism rings.