Paper 2026/2452

Genericity in multivariate cryptography

Simon Abelard, Graduate School of Computer Science and Advanced Technologies
Pierre Pébereau, KU Leuven
Mohab Safey El Din, Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique de Paris 6
Abstract

The results in this paper establish the genericity of some properties of the ideals and varieties generated by UOV public keys, in particular the equidimensionality of the UOV varieties and the radicality of public key ideals. These genericity results justify the various regularity assumptions that are made on polynomial systems of equations arising in the cryptanalysis of UOV and its variants. We also provide examples in the recent literature showing how genericity questions arise in crypt- analysis and why genericity should be taken into consideration when de- signing cryptographic schemes. Lastly, we perform a retrospective study of various cryptographic schemes through the viewangle of genericity. We identify several cases in which non-genericity led to the cryptanaly- sis of the scheme, but also provide a counter-example of a scheme whose non-genericity does not seem easy to exploit.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Multivariate cryptographyalgebraic cryptanalysisUOV
Contact author(s)
simon abelard @ epita fr
pierre pebereau @ esat kuleuven be
mohab safey @ lip6 fr
History
2026-10-14: approved
2026-10-12: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2026/2452
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/2452,
      author = {Simon Abelard and Pierre Pébereau and Mohab Safey El Din},
      title = {Genericity in multivariate cryptography},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/2452},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2452}
}
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