International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In 2023, Basso, Maino, and Pope proposed FESTA~(Fast Encryption from Supersingular Torsion Attacks), an isogeny-based public-key encryption (PKE) protocol that uses the SIDH attack for decryption. In the same paper, they proposed parameters for that protocol, but the parameters require high-degree isogeny computations. In this paper, we introduce QFESTA~(Quaternion Fast Encapsulation from Supersingular Torsion Attacks), a new variant of FESTA that works with better parameters using quaternion algebras and achieves IND-CCA security under QROM. To realize our protocol, we construct a new algorithm to compute an isogeny of non-smooth degree using quaternion algebras and the SIDH attack. Our protocol relies solely on $(2,2)$-isogeny and $3$-isogeny computations, promising a substantial reduction in computational costs. In addition, our protocol has significantly smaller data sizes for public keys and ciphertexts, approximately half size of the original FESTA.

The Deuring correspondence is a correspondence between supersingular elliptic curves and quaternion orders. Under this correspondence, an isogeny between elliptic curves corresponds to a quaternion ideal. This correspondence plays an important role in isogeny-based cryptography and several algorithms to compute an isogeny corresponding to a quaternion ideal (ideal-to-isogeny algorithms) have been proposed. In particular, SQIsign is a signature scheme based on the Deuring correspondence and uses an ideal-to-isogeny algorithm. In this paper, we propose a novel ideal-to-isogeny algorithm using isogenies of dimension $2$. Our algorithm is based on Kani's reducibility theorem, which gives a connection between isogenies of dimension $1$ and $2$. By using the characteristic $p$ of the base field of the form $2^fg - 1$ for a small odd integer $g$, our algorithm works by only $2$-isogenies and $(2, 2)$-isogenies in the operations in $\mathbb{F}_{p^2}$. We apply our algorithm to SQIsign and compare the efficiency of the new algorithm with the existing one. Our analysis shows that the key generation and the signing in our algorithm are at least twice as fast as those in the existing algorithm at the NIST security level 1. This advantage becomes more significant at higher security levels. In addition, our algorithm also improves the efficiency of the verification in SQIsign.

Isogeny-based cryptography is cryptographic schemes whose security is based on the hardness of a mathematical problem called the isogeny problem, and is attracting attention as one of the candidates for post-quantum cryptography. A representative isogeny-based cryptography is the signature scheme called SQIsign, which was submitted to the NIST PQC standardization competition. SQIsign has attracted much attention because of its very short signature and key size among the candidates for the NIST PQC standardization. Recently, a lot of new schemes have been proposed that use high-dimensional isogenies. Among them, the signature scheme called SQIsignHD has an even shorter signature size than SQIsign. However, it requires 4-dimensional isogeny computations for the signature verification. In this paper, we propose a new signature scheme, SQIsign2D-East, which requires only two-dimensional isogeny computations for verification, thus reducing the computational cost of verification. First, we generalized an algorithm called RandIsogImg, which computes a random isogeny of non-smooth degree. Then, by using this generalized RandIsogImg, we construct a new signature scheme SQIsign2D-East.

We work on some open problems in radical isogenies. Radical isogenies are formulas to compute chains of N-isogenies for small N and proposed by Castryck, Decru, and Vercauteren in Asiacrypt 2020. These formulas do not need to generate a point of order N generating the kernel and accelerate some isogeny-based cryptosystems like CSIDH. On the other hand, since these formulas use Tate normal forms, these need to transform Tate normal forms to curves with efficient arithmetic, e.g., Montgomery curves. In this paper, we propose radical-isogeny formulas of degrees 3 and 4 on Montgomery curves. Our formulas compute some values determining Montgomery curves, from which one can efficiently recover Montgomery coefficients. And our formulas are more efficient for some cryptosystems than the original radical isogenies. In addition, we prove a conjecture left open by Castryck et al. that relates to radical isogenies of degree 4.

We propose two new supersingular isogeny-based public key encryptions: SiGamal and C-SiGamal. They were developed by giving an additional point of the order $2^r$ to CSIDH. SiGamal is similar to ElGamal encryption, while C-SiGamal is a compressed version of SiGamal. We prove that SiGamal and C-SiGamal are IND-CPA secure without using hash functions under a new assumption: the P-CSSDDH assumption. This assumption comes from the expectation that no efficient algorithm can distinguish between a random point and a point that is the image of a public point under a hidden isogeny. Next, we propose a Naor-Reingold type pseudo random function (PRF) based on SiGamal. If the P-CSSDDH assumption and the CSSDDH$^*$ assumption, which guarantees the security of CSIDH that uses a prime $p$ in the setting of SiGamal, hold, then our proposed function is a pseudo random function. Moreover, we estimate that the computational costs of group actions to compute our proposed PRF are about $\sqrt{\frac{8T}{3\pi}}$ times that of the group actions in CSIDH, where $T$ is the Hamming weight of the input of the PRF. Finally, we experimented with group actions in SiGamal and C-SiGamal. The computational costs of group actions in SiGamal-512 with a $256$-bit plaintext message space were about $2.62$ times that of a group action in CSIDH-512.