Abstract. In this paper we propose a new approach to investigate the security of the McEliece cryptosystem. We recall that this cryptosystem relies on the use of error-correcting codes. Since its invention thirty years ago, no efficient attack had been devised that managed to recover the private key. We prove that the private key of the cryptosystem satisfies a system of bi-homogeneous polynomial equations. This property is due to the particular class of codes considered which are alternant codes. We have used these highly structured algebraic equations to mount an efficient key-recovery attack against two recent variants of the McEliece cryptosystems that aim at reducing public key sizes. These two compact variants of McEliece managed to propose keys with less than 20,000 bits. To do so, they proposed to use quasi-cyclic or dyadic structures. An implementation of our algebraic attack in the computer algebra system Magma allows to find the secret-key in a negligible time (less than one second) for almost all the proposed challenges. For instance, a private key designed for a 256-bit security has been found in 0.06 seconds with about 2 17.8 operations.

In this paper, we present an improved approach to solve multivariate systems over finite fields. Our approach is a tradeoff between exhaustive search and Gröbner bases techniques. We give theoretical evidences that our method brings a significant improvement in a very large context and we clearly define its limitations. The efficiency depends on the choice of the tradeoff. Our analysis gives an explicit way to choose the best tradeoff as well as an approximation. From our analysis, we present a new general algorithm to solve multivariate polynomial systems. Our theoretical results are experimentally supported by successful cryptanalysis of several multivariate schemes (TRMS, UOV, . . . ). As a proof of concept, we were able to break the proposed parameters assumed to be secure until now. Parameters that resists to our method are also explicitly given. Our work permits to refine the parameters to be chosen for multivariate schemes.

Abstract. This work presents a study of the complexity of the Blum-Kalai-Wasserman (BKW) algorithm when applied to the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem, by providing refined estimates for the data and computational effort requirements for solving concrete instances of the LWE problem. We apply this refined analysis to suggested parameters for various LWE-based cryptographic schemes from the literature and compare with alternative approaches based on lattice reduction. As a result, we provide new upper bounds for the concrete hardness of these LWE-based schemes. Rather surprisingly, it appears that BKW algorithm outperforms known estimates for lattice reduction algorithms starting in dimension n ≈ 250 when LWE is reduced to SIS. However, this assumes access to an unbounded number of LWE samples.

The Goppa Code Distinguishing (GD) problem consists in distinguishing the matrix of a Goppa code from a random matrix. The hardness of this problem is an assumption to prove the security of code-based cryptographic primitives such as McEliece's cryptosystem. Up to now, it is widely believed that the GD problem is a hard decision problem. We present the first method allowing to distinguish alternant and Goppa codes over any field. Our technique can solve the GD problem in polynomial-time provided that the codes have sufficiently large rates. The key ingredient is an algebraic characterization of the key-recovery problem. The idea is to consider the rank of a linear system which is obtained by linearizing a particular polynomial system describing a key-recovery attack. It appears that this dimension depends on the type of code considered. Explicit formulas derived from extensive experimentations for the rank are provided for "generic" random, alternant, and Goppa codes over any field. Finally, we give theoretical explanations of these formulas in the case of random codes, alternant codes over any field of characteristic two and binary Goppa codes.

In this paper, we investigate the difficulty of one of the most relevant problems in multivariate cryptography-namely MinRankabout which no real progress has been reported since [9, 19]. Our starting point is the Kipnis-Shamir attack [19]. We first show new properties of the ideal generated by Kipnis-Shamir's equations. We then propose a new modeling of the problem. Concerning the practical resolution, we adopt a Gröbner basis approach that permitted us to actually solve challenges A and B proposed by Courtois in [8]. Using the multi-homogeneous structure of the algebraic system, we have been able to provide a theoretical complexity bound reflecting the practical behavior of our approach. Namely, when r the dimension of the matrices minus the rank of the target matrix in the MinRank problem is constant, then we have a polynomial time attack O " ln (q) n 3 r 2 ". For the challenge C [8], we obtain a theoretical bound of 2 66.3 operations.

We investigate in this paper the security of HFE and Multi-HFE schemes as well as their minus and embedding variants. Multi-HFE is a generalization of the well-known HFE schemes. The idea is to use a multivariate quadratic system-instead of a univariate polynomial in HFE-over an extension field as a private key. According to the authors, this should make the classical direct algebraic (message-recovery) attack proposed by Faugère and Joux on HFE no longer efficient against Multi-HFE. We consider here the hardness of the key-recovery in Multi-HFE and its variants, but also in HFE (both for odd and even characteristic). We first improve and generalize the basic key recovery proposed by Kipnis and Shamir on HFE. To do so, we express this attack as matrix/vector operations. In one hand, this permits to improve the basic Kipnis-Shamir (KS) attack on HFE. On the other hand, this allows to generalize the attack on Multi-HFE. Due to its structure, we prove that a Multi-HFE scheme has much more equivalent keys than a basic HFE. This induces a structural weakness which can be exploited to adapt the KS attack against classical modifiers of multivariate schemes such as minus and embedding. Along the way, we discovered that the KS attack as initially described cannot be applied against HFE in characteristic 2. We have then strongly revised KS in characteristic 2 to make it work. In all cases, the cost of our attacks is related to the complexity of solving MinRank. Thanks to recent complexity results on this problem, we prove that our attack is polynomial in the degree of the extension field for all possible practical settings used in HFE and Multi-HFE. This makes then Multi-HFE less secure than basic HFE for equally-sized keys. As a proof of concept, we have been able to practically break the most conservative proposed parameters of multi-HFE in few days (256 bits security broken in 9 days).

The goal of this paper is to further study the index calculus method that was first introduced by Semaev for solving the ECDLP and later developed by Gaudry and Diem. In particular, we focus on the step which consists in decomposing points of the curve with respect to an appropriately chosen factor basis. This part can be nicely reformulated as a purely algebraic problem consisting in finding solutions to a multivariate polynomial f (x1,. .. , xm) = 0 such that x1,. .. , xm all belong to some vector subspace of F2n /F2. Our main contribution is the identification of particular structures inherent to such polynomial systems and a dedicated method for tackling this problem. We solve it by means of Gröbner basis techniques and analyze its complexity using the multi-homogeneous structure of the equations. A direct consequence of our results is an index calculus algorithm solving ECDLP over any binary field F2n in time O(2 ω t), with t ≈ n/2 (provided that a certain heuristic assumption holds). This has to be compared with Diem's [14] index calculus based approach for solving ECDLP over Fqn which has complexity exp O(n log(n) 1/2) for q = 2 and n a prime (but this holds without any heuristic assumption). We emphasize that the complexity obtained here is very conservative in comparison to experimental results. We hope the new ideas provided here may lead to efficient index calculus based methods for solving ECDLP in theory and practice.

Abstract. The Isomorphism of Polynomials (IP) [28], which is the main concern of this paper, originally corresponds to the problem of recovering the secret key of a C * scheme [26]. Besides, the security of various other schemes (signature, authentication [28], traitor tracing [5], . . . ) also depends on the practical hardness of IP. Due to its numerous applications, the Isomorphism of Polynomials is thus one of the most fundamental problems in multivariate cryptography. In this paper, we address two complementary aspects of IP, namely its theoretical and practical difficulty. We present an upper bound on the theoretical complexity of "IP-like" problems, i.e. a problem consisting in recovering a particular transformation between two sets of multivariate polynomials. We prove that these problems are not NP-Hard (provided that the polynomial hierarchy does not collapse). Concerning the practical aspect, we present a new algorithm for solving IP. In a nutshell, the idea is to generate a suitable algebraic system of equations whose zeroes correspond to a solution of IP. From a practical point of view, we employed a fast Gröbner basis algorithm, namely F5 [17], for solving this system. This approach is efficient in practice and obliges to modify the current security criteria for IP. We have indeed broken several challenges proposed in literature [28,29,5]. For instance, we solved a challenge proposed by O. Billet and H. Gilbert at Asiacrypt'03 [5] in less than one second.