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Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques

EUROCRYPT 2021: Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2021 pp 348–373Cite as

Improved Cryptanalysis of UOV and Rainbow

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 12696)

Abstract

The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we simplify the description of the Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar scheme (UOV) and its Rainbow variant, which makes it easier to understand the scheme and the existing attacks. We hope that this will make UOV and Rainbow more approachable for cryptanalysts. Second, we give two new attacks against the UOV and Rainbow signature schemes; the intersection attack that applies to both UOV and Rainbow and the rectangular MinRank attack that applies only to Rainbow. Our attacks are more powerful than existing attacks. In particular, we estimate that compared to previously known attacks, our new attacks reduce the cost of a key recovery by a factor of \(2^{17}\), \(2^{53}\), and \(2^{73}\) for the parameter sets submitted to the second round of the NIST PQC standardization project targeting the security levels I, III, and V respectively. For the third round parameters, the cost is reduced by a factor of \(2^{20}\), \(2^{40}\), and \(2^{55}\) respectively. This means all these parameter sets fall short of the security requirements set out by NIST.

This work was supported by CyberSecurity Research Flanders with reference number VR20192203, and by the Research Council KU Leuven grant C14/18/067 on Cryptanalysis of post-quantum cryptography. Ward Beullens is funded by FWO SB fellowship 1S95620N.

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Fig. 1.
Fig. 2.

Notes

  1. 1.

    In fields of characteristic 2 and in case n is odd, the \(M_i\) are never invertible, because \(M_i\) is skew-symmetric and with zeros on the diagonal and therefore has even rank. (Recall that \(M_i = Q_i + Q_i^\perp \) as in the proof of Theorem 1.) To avoid this case we can always set one of the variables to zero. This has the effect of reducing n by one (which gets us back to the case where n is even), and it also reduces the dimension of O by one, which makes the attack slightly less powerful. Since this trick is always possible, we will assume that n is even in the remainder of the paper.

  2. 2.

    The \(\tilde{O}\)-notation ignores polynomial factors.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Bo-Yin Yang and Jintai Ding for providing helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. imec-COSIC, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Ward Beullens

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  1. Ward Beullens
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Correspondence to Ward Beullens .

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  1. Inria, Paris, France

    Anne Canteaut

  2. UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    François-Xavier Standaert

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Beullens, W. (2021). Improved Cryptanalysis of UOV and Rainbow. In: Canteaut, A., Standaert, FX. (eds) Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2021. EUROCRYPT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12696. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77870-5_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77870-5_13

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