Improved Cryptanalysis of the KMOV Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem

Abstract

This paper presents two new improved attacks on the KMOV cryptosystem. KMOV is an encryption algorithm based on elliptic curves over the ring ZN where N = pq is a product of two large primes of equal bit size. The first attack uses the properties of the convergents of the continued fraction expansion of a specific value derived from the KMOV public key. The second attack is based on Coppersmith's method for finding small solutions of a multivariate polynomial modular equation. Both attacks improve the existing attacks on the KMOV cryptosystem.