International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Since May (Crypto’02) revealed the vulnerability of the small CRT-exponent RSA using Coppersmith’s lattice-based method, several papers have studied the problem and two major improvements have been made. (1) Bleichenbacher and May (PKC’06) proposed an attack for small $$d_q$$ d q when the prime factor p is significantly smaller than the other prime factor q ; the attack works for $$p<N^{0.468}$$ p < N 0.468 . (2) Jochemsz and May (Crypto’07) proposed an attack for small $$d_p$$ d p and $$d_q$$ d q when the prime factors p and q are balanced; the attack works for $$d_p, d_q<N^{0.073}$$ d p , d q < N 0.073 . Even a decade has passed since their proposals, the above two attacks are still considered as the state of the art, and no improvements have been made thus far. A novel technique seems to be required for further improvements since it seems that the attacks have been studied with all the applicable techniques for Coppersmith’s methods proposed by Durfee–Nguyen (Asiacrypt’00), Jochemsz–May (Asiacrypt’06), and Herrmann–May (Asiacrypt’09, PKC’10). Since it seems that the attacks have been studied with all the applicable techniques for Coppersmith’s methods proposed by Durfee–Nguyen (Asiacrypt’00), Jochemsz–May (Asiacrypt’06), and Herrmann–May (Asiacrypt’09, PKC’10), improving the previous results seem technically hard. In this paper, we propose two improved attacks on the small CRT-exponent RSA: a small $$d_q$$ d q attack for $$p<N^{0.5}$$ p < N 0.5 (an improvement of Bleichenbacher–May’s) and a small $$d_p$$ d p and $$d_q$$ d q attack for $$d_p, d_q < N^{0.122}$$ d p , d q < N 0.122 (an improvement of Jochemsz–May’s). The latter result is also an improvement of our result in the proceeding version (Eurocrypt ’17); $$d_p, d_q < N^{0.091}$$ d p , d q < N 0.091 . We use Coppersmith’s lattice-based method to solve modular equations and obtain the improvements from a novel lattice construction by exploiting useful algebraic structures of the CRT-RSA key generation equation. We explicitly show proofs of our attacks and verify the validities by computer experiments. In addition to the two main attacks, we also propose small $$d_q$$ d q attacks on several variants of RSA.