Abstract
For cryptographic applications, in order to avoid a reduction of the discrete logarithm problem via the Chinese remainder theorem, one usually considers elliptic curves over finite fields whose order is a prime times a small so-called cofactor c. It is, however, possible to attack specific curves with this property via dedicated attacks. Particularly, if an elliptic curve \(E/\mathbb {F}_{q^n}\) is given, one might try to use the idea of cover attacks to reduce the problem to the corresponding problem in the Jacobian of a curve of genus \(g \ge n\) over \(\mathbb {F}_q\). In the given situation, the only attack so far which follows this idea is the GHS attack, this attack requires that the cofactor c is divisible by 4 as otherwise the genus of the resulting curve is too large. We present an algorithm for finding genus 3 hyperelliptic covers for the case \(c=2\). The construction works in odd characteristic and the resulting cover map has degree 3. As an application, two explicit examples of elliptic curves whose order are respectively 2 times a 149-bit prime and 2 times a 256-bit prime vulnerable to the attack are given.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge Claus Diem for various discussions which inspired this research, Benjamin Smith for the isogeny computation that occurred in the Example 2, and the anonymous referees for their useful suggestions which improved this paper. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61502487 and 61772515. Furthermore, the first author acknowledges the scholarship provided by German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
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Tian, S., Li, B., Wang, K. et al. Cover attacks for elliptic curves with cofactor two. Des. Codes Cryptogr. 86, 2451–2468 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-018-0457-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-018-0457-6