Paper 2026/2088

Detecting split surfaces, RM surfaces, and minimum walks on isogeny graphs

Abstract

We study the detectability of split surfaces in isogeny graphs of principally polarized superspecial abelian surfaces, a question relevant to the security analysis of dimension-$2$ isogeny-based cryptography. Our approach uses refined Humbert invariants to replace explicit isogeny computations with primitive representation problems for positive definite quadratic forms in five variables. We develop algorithms to detect $(N,N)$-splittings and to compute the minimum $(N,N)$-splitting level of a superspecial Jacobian without constructing the corresponding isogeny path. The same framework detects embeddings of real multiplication (RM) orders through primitive representations of discriminants of real quadratic orders. For RM, we use exhaustive small-prime data together with $100{,}000$ random polarizations per prime for $227\leq p\leq1619$, testing primitive representations of square-free discriminants $D\leq100$; the first nontrivial primitively represented discriminant is typically small. We apply these methods experimentally in two regimes. For $11\leq p\leq251$, where the irreducible principal polarizations are known exhaustively, the automorphism data recovered from the refined Humbert invariant reproduces the counts of Ibukiyama--Katsura--Oort for the irreducible polarizations. For large parameters, we reach primes of $1000$ bits, where the splitting degrees produced satisfy $\log_2N\approx\log_2p$ with a distribution whose shape is stable across the whole range, so the detected $(N,N)$-isogeny has degree about $p^{2}$; the smallest observed largest prime-power divisor of $N$ remains small up to $250$ bits and increases sharply from $300$ bits onward.