Magali Bardet

Magali Bardet, Pierre Briaud

Rank-metric code-based cryptography relies on the hardness of decoding a random linear code in the rank metric. The Rank Support Learning problem (RSL) is a variant where an attacker has access to N decoding instances whose errors have the same support and wants to solve one of them. This problem is for instance used in the Durandal signature scheme. In this paper, we propose an algebraic attack on RSL which clearly outperforms the previous attacks to solve this problem. We build upon Bardet et al., Asiacrypt 2020, where similar techniques are used to solve MinRank and RD. However, our analysis is simpler and overall our attack relies on very elementary assumptions compared to standard Gr{ö}bner bases attacks. In particular, our results show that key recovery attacks on Durandal are more efficient than was previously thought.

Magali Bardet, Maxime Bros, Daniel Cabarcas et al.

Rank Decoding (RD) is the main underlying problem in rank-based cryptography. Based on this problem and quasi-cyclic versions of it, very efficient schemes have been proposed recently, such as those in the ROLLO and RQC submissions, which have reached the second round of the NIST Post-Quantum competition. Two main approaches have been studied to solve RD: combinatorial ones and algebraic ones. While the former has been studied extensively, a better understanding of the latter was recently obtained by Bardet et al. (EUROCRYPT20) where it appeared that algebraic attacks can often be more efficient than combinatorial ones for cryptographic parameters. This paper gives substantial improvements upon this attack in terms both of complexity and of the assumptions required by the cryptanalysis. We present attacks for ROLLO-I-128, 192, and 256 with bit complexity respectively in 70, 86, and 158, to be compared to 117, 144, and 197 for the aforementionned previous attack. Moreover, unlike this previous attack, ours does not need generic Gröbner basis algorithms since it only requires to solve a linear system. For a case called overdetermined, this modeling allows us to avoid Gröbner basis computations by going directly to solving a linear system. For the other case, called underdetermined, we also improve the results from the previous attack by combining the Ourivski-Johansson modeling together with a new modeling for a generic MinRank instance; the latter modeling allows us to refine the analysis of MinRank's complexity given in the paper by Verbel et al. (PQC19). Finally, since the proposed parameters of ROLLO and RQC are completely broken by our new attack, we give examples of new parameters for ROLLO and RQC that make them resistant to our attacks. These new parameters show that these systems remain attractive, with a loss of only about 50\% in terms of key size for ROLLO-I.

Magali Bardet, Pierre Briaud, Maxime Bros et al.

The Rank metric decoding problem is the main problem considered in cryptography based on codes in the rank metric. Very efficient schemes based on this problem or quasi-cyclic versions of it have been proposed recently, such as those in the submissions ROLLO and RQC currently at the second round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process. While combinatorial attacks on this problem have been extensively studied and seem now well understood, the situation is not as satisfactory for algebraic attacks, for which previous work essentially suggested that they were ineffective for cryptographic parameters. In this paper, starting from Ourivski and Johansson's algebraic modelling of the problem into a system of polynomial equations, we show how to augment this system with easily computed equations so that the augmented system is solved much faster via Groebner bases. This happens because the augmented system has solving degree $r$, $r+1$ or $r+2$ depending on the parameters, where $r$ is the rank weight, which we show by extending results from Verbel et al. (PQCrypto 2019) on systems arising from the MinRank problem; with target rank $r$, Verbel et al. lower the solving degree to $r+2$, and even less for some favorable instances that they call superdetermined. We give complexity bounds for this approach as well as practical timings of an implementation using Magma. This improves upon the previously known complexity estimates for both Groebner basis and (non-quantum) combinatorial approaches, and for example leads to an attack in 200 bits on ROLLO-I-256 whose claimed security was 256 bits.

Magali Bardet, Manon Bertin, Alain Couvreur et al.

DAGS scheme is a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) based on quasi-dyadic alternant codes that was submitted to NIST standardization process for a quantum resistant public key algorithm. Recently an algebraic attack was devised by Barelli and Couvreur (Asiacrypt 2018) that efficiently recovers the private key. It shows that DAGS can be totally cryptanalysed by solving a system of bilinear polynomial equations. However, some sets of DAGS parameters were not broken in practice. In this paper we improve the algebraic attack by showing that the original approach was not optimal in terms of the ratio of the number of equations to the number of variables. Contrary to the common belief that reducing at any cost the number of variables in a polynomial system is always beneficial, we actually observed that, provided that the ratio is increased and up to a threshold, the solving can be heavily improved by adding variables to the polynomial system. This enables us to recover the private keys in a few seconds. Furthermore, our experimentations also show that the maximum degree reached during the computation of the Gröbner basis is an important parameter that explains the efficiency of the attack. Finally, the authors of DAGS updated the parameters to take into account the algebraic cryptanalysis of Barelli and Couvreur. In the present article, we propose a hybrid approach that performs an exhaustive search on some variables and computes a Gröbner basis on the polynomial system involving the remaining variables. We then show that the updated set of parameters corresponding to 128-bit security can be broken with 2^83 operations.