International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

Benjamin Benčina

Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2025
EUROCRYPT
Hollow LWE: A New Spin, Unbounded Updatable Encryption from LWE and PCE
Updatable public-key encryption (UPKE) allows anyone to update a public key while simultaneously producing an update token, given which the secret key holder could consistently update the secret key. Furthermore, ciphertexts encrypted under the old public key remain secure even if the updated secret key is leaked -- a property much desired in secure messaging. All existing lattice-based constructions of UPKE update keys by a noisy linear shift. As the noise accumulates, these schemes either require super-polynomial-size moduli or an a priori bounded number of updates to maintain decryption correctness. Inspired by recent works on cryptography based on the lattice isomorphism problem, we propose an alternative way to update keys in lattice-based UPKE. Instead of shifting, we rotate them. As rotations do not induce norm growth, our construction supports an unbounded number of updates with a polynomial-size modulus. The security of our scheme is based on the LWE assumption over hollow matrices -- matrices which generate linear codes with non-trivial hull -- and the hardness of permutation code equivalence. Along the way, we also show that LWE over hollow matrices is as hard as LWE over uniform matrices, and that a leftover hash lemma holds for hollow matrices.
2024
CRYPTO
Improved algorithms for finding fixed-degree isogenies between supersingular elliptic curves
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.