Two attacks on rank metric code-based schemes: RankSign and an Identity-Based-Encryption scheme
This work exposes critical vulnerabilities in quantum-safe cryptographic schemes, impacting their deployment for secure communications.
The authors broke the RankSign signature scheme and its associated Identity-Based-Encryption (IBE) scheme by exploiting low-weight codewords in augmented LRPC codes, rendering the IBE uninstantiable with current parameters, and also attacked the underlying security problem, though the IBE might be salvageable with parameter adjustments.
RankSign [GRSZ14a] is a code-based signature scheme proposed to the NIST competition for quantum-safe cryptography [AGHRZ17] and, moreover, is a fundamental building block of a new Identity-Based-Encryption (IBE) [GHPT17a]. This signature scheme is based on the rank metric and enjoys remarkably small key sizes, about 10KBytes for an intended level of security of 128 bits. Unfortunately we will show that all the parameters proposed for this scheme in [AGHRZ17] can be broken by an algebraic attack that exploits the fact that the augmented LRPC codes used in this scheme have very low weight codewords. Therefore, without RankSign the IBE cannot be instantiated at this time. As a second contribution we will show that the problem is deeper than finding a new signature in rank-based cryptography, we also found an attack on the generic problem upon which its security reduction relies. However, contrarily to the RankSign scheme, it seems that the parameters of the IBE scheme could be chosen in order to avoid our attack. Finally, we have also shown that if one replaces the rank metric in the [GHPT17a] IBE scheme by the Hamming metric, then a devastating attack can be found.