International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Finding isogenies between supersingular elliptic curves is a natural algorithmic problem which is known to be equivalent to computing the curves' endomorphism rings. When the isogeny is additionally required to have a specific known degree $d$, the problem appears to be somewhat different in nature, yet its hardness is also required in isogeny-based cryptography. Let $E_1,E_2$ be supersingular elliptic curves over $\mathbb{F}_{p^2}$. We present improved classical and quantum algorithms that compute an isogeny of degree $d$ between $E_1$ and $E_2$ if it exists. Let $d \approx p^{1/2+ \epsilon}$ for some $\epsilon>0$. Our essentially memory-free algorithms have better time complexity than meet-in-the-middle algorithms, which require exponential memory storage, in the range $1/2\leq\epsilon\leq 3/4$ on a classical computer. For quantum computers, we improve the time complexity in the range $0<\epsilon<5/2$. Our strategy is to compute the endomorphism rings of both curves, compute the reduced norm form associated to $\Hom(E_1,E_2)$ and try to represent the integer $d$ as a solution of this form. We present multiple approaches to solving this problem which combine guessing certain variables exhaustively (or use Grover's search in the quantum case) with methods for solving quadratic Diophantine equations such as Cornacchia's algorithm and multivariate variants of Coppersmith's method. For the different approaches, we provide implementations and experimental results. A solution to the norm form can then be efficiently translated to recover the sought-after isogeny using well-known techniques. As a consequence of our results we show that a recently introduced signature scheme from~\cite{BassoSIDHsign} does not reach NIST level I security.

We present SCALLOP: SCALable isogeny action based on Oriented supersingular curves with Prime conductor, a new group action based on isogenies of supersingular curves. Similarly to CSIDH and OSIDH, we use the group action of an imaginary quadratic order's class group on the set of oriented supersingular curves. Compared to CSIDH, the main benefit of our construction is that it is easy to compute the class-group structure; this data is required to uniquely represent - and efficiently act by - arbitrary group elements, which is a requirement in, e.g., the CSI-FiSh signature scheme by Beullens, Kleinjung and Vercauteren. The index-calculus algorithm used in CSI-FiSh to compute the class-group structure has complexity $L(1/2)$, ruling out class groups much larger than CSIDH-512, a limitation that is particularly problematic in light of the ongoing debate regarding the quantum security of cryptographic group actions. Hoping to solve this issue, we consider the class group of a quadratic order of large prime conductor inside an imaginary quadratic field of small discriminant. This family of quadratic orders lets us easily determine the size of the class group, and, by carefully choosing the conductor, even exercise significant control on it - in particular supporting highly smooth choices. Although evaluating the resulting group action still has subexponential asymptotic complexity, a careful choice of parameters leads to a practical speedup that we demonstrate in practice for a security level equivalent to CSIDH-1024, a parameter currently firmly out of reach of index-calculus-based methods. However, our implementation takes 35 seconds (resp. 12.5 minutes) for a single group-action evaluation at a CSIDH-512-equivalent (resp. CSIDH-1024-equivalent) security level, showing that, while feasible, the SCALLOP group action does not achieve realistically usable performance yet.

In this paper we study non-trivial self-pairings with cyclic domains that are compatible with isogenies between elliptic curves oriented by an imaginary quadratic order $\mathcal{O}$. We prove that the order $m$ of such a self-pairing necessarily satisfies $m \mid \Delta_{\mathcal{O}}$ (and even $2m \mid \Delta_{\mathcal{O}} $ if $4 \mid \Delta_{\mathcal{O}}$ and $4m \mid \Delta_{\mathcal{O}}$ if $8 \mid \Delta_{\mathcal{O}}$) and is not a multiple of the field characteristic. Conversely, for each $m$ satisfying these necessary conditions, we construct a family of non-trivial cyclic self-pairings of order $m$ that are compatible with oriented isogenies, based on generalized Weil and Tate pairings. As an application, we identify weak instances of class group actions on elliptic curves assuming the degree of the secret isogeny is known. More in detail, we show that if $m^2 \mid \Delta_{\mathcal{O}}$ for some prime power $m$ then given two primitively $\mathcal{O}$-oriented elliptic curves $(E, \iota)$ and $(E',\iota') = [\mathfrak{a}](E,\iota)$ connected by an unknown invertible ideal $\mathfrak{a} \subseteq \mathcal{O}$, we can recover $\mathfrak{a}$ essentially at the cost of a discrete logarithm computation in a group of order $m^2$, assuming the norm of $\mathfrak{a}$ is given and is smaller than $m^2$. We give concrete instances, involving ordinary elliptic curves over finite fields, where this turns into a polynomial time attack. Finally, we show that these self-pairings simplify known results on the decisional Diffie-Hellman problem for class group actions on oriented elliptic curves.

It has recently been rigorously proven (and was previously known under certain heuristics) that the general supersingular isogeny problem reduces to the supersingular endomorphism ring computation problem. However, in order to attack SIDH-type schemes, one requires a particular isogeny which is usually not returned by the general reduction. At Asiacrypt 2016, Galbraith, Petit, Shani and Ti presented a polynomial-time reduction of the problem of finding the secret isogeny in SIDH to the problem of computing the endomorphism ring of a supersingular elliptic curve. Their method exploits the fact that secret isogenies in SIDH are of degree approximately $p^{1/2}$. The method does not extend to other SIDH-type schemes, where secret isogenies of larger degree are used and this condition is not fulfilled. We present a more general reduction algorithm that generalises to all SIDH-type schemes. The main idea of our algorithm is to exploit available torsion point images together with the KLPT algorithm to obtain a linear system of equations over a certain residue class ring. We show that this system will have a unique solution that can be lifted to the integers if some mild conditions on the parameters are satisfied. This lift then yields the secret isogeny. One consequence of this work is that the choice of the prime $p$ in \mbox{B-SIDH} is tight.

Supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman key exchange (SIDH) is a post-quantum protocol based on the presumed hardness of computing an isogeny between two supersingular elliptic curves given some additional torsion point information. Unlike other isogeny-based protocols, SIDH has been widely believed to be immune to subexponential quantum attacks because of the non-commutative structure of the endomorphism rings of supersingular curves. We contradict this commonly believed misconception in this paper. More precisely, we highlight the existence of an abelian group action on the SIDH key space, and we show that for sufficiently \emph{unbalanced} and \emph{overstretched} SIDH parameters, this action can be efficiently computed (heuristically) using the torsion point information revealed in the protocol. This reduces the underlying hardness assumption to a hidden shift problem instance which can be solved in quantum subexponential time. We formulate our attack in a new framework allowing the inversion of one-way functions in quantum subexponential time provided a malleability oracle with respect to some commutative group action. This framework unifies our new attack with earlier subexponential quantum attacks on isogeny-based protocols, and it may be of further interest for cryptanalysis.

We cryptanalyse the SIDH-based oblivious pseudorandom function from supersingular isogenies proposed at Asiacrypt'20 by Boneh, Kogan and Woo. To this end, we give an attack on an assumption, the auxiliary one-more assumption, that was introduced by Boneh et al. and we show that this leads to an attack on the oblivious PRF itself. The attack breaks the pseudorandomness as it allows adversaries to evaluate the OPRF without further interactions with the server after some initial OPRF evaluations and some offline computations. More specifically, we first propose a polynomial-time attack. Then, we argue it is easy to change the OPRF protocol to include some countermeasures, and present a second subexponential attack that succeeds in the presence of said countermeasures. Both attacks break the security parameters suggested by Boneh et al. Furthermore, we provide a proof of concept implementation as well as some timings of our attack. Finally, we examine the generation of one of the OPRF parameters and argue that a trusted third party is needed to guarantee provable security.

Braid groups are infinite non-abelian groups naturally arising from geometric braids. For two decades they have been proposed for cryptographic use. In braid group cryptography public braids often contain secret braids as factors and it is hoped that rewriting the product of braid words hides individual factors. We provide experimental evidence that this is in general not the case and argue that under certain conditions parts of the Garside normal form of factors can be found in the Garside normal form of their product. This observation can be exploited to decompose products of braids of the form ABC when only B is known.Our decomposition algorithm yields a universal forgery attack on WalnutDSATM, which is one of the 20 proposed signature schemes that are being considered by NIST for standardization of quantum-resistant public-key cryptography. Our attack on WalnutDSATM can universally forge signatures within seconds for both the 128-bit and 256-bit security level, given one random message-signature pair. The attack worked on 99.8% and 100% of signatures for the 128-bit and 256-bit security levels in our experiments.Furthermore, we show that the decomposition algorithm can be used to solve instances of the conjugacy search problem and decomposition search problem in braid groups. These problems are at the heart of other cryptographic schemes based on braid groups.