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Public-key cryptosystems from lattice reduction problems. (English) Zbl 0889.94011
Kaliski, Burton S. jun. (ed.), Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO ’97. 17th annual international cryptology conference. Santa Barbara, CA, USA. August 17–21, 1997. Proceedings. Berlin: Springer. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 1294, 112-131 (1997).
A lattice $$L(B)$$ is defined as the integral combinations of basis vectors of the basis $$B= \{b_1,\ldots, b_n\}$$. There are two difficult problems related to lattices. The first one is the CVP (Closest Vector Problem), i.e. given a lattice $$L(B)$$ with basis $$B$$ and an arbitrary vector $$v$$, find a vector in the lattice $$L(B)$$ that is closest to $$v$$ in some norm. The second one is the SBP (Smallest Basis Problem), i.e. find a basis $$B'$$ for a lattice $$L(B)$$ such that the orthogonality defect (i.e. $$\prod|b_i|/|\det(B)|$$) is the smallest.
The first problem is known to be NP-hard for any $$l_p$$-norm. For the second no known polynomial time solution is known.
The proposed cryptosystem makes use of two bases for the same lattice $$L$$.
The basis $$B$$ has a small orthogonality defect (i.e. the orthogonality defect of the inverse matrix $$B^{-1}$$). The basis $$B'$$ has a large one. The matrix $$B'$$ is made public.
The observation now is that if $$v$$ is a random vector and $$e$$ is a random noise vector satisfying some properties then if $$B'v+e$$ is known, $$v$$ can be reconstructed in a simple way if $$B$$ is known, but it is difficult to reconstruct $$v$$ if $$B$$ is not known. The proposed cryptosystem makes use of this observation by embedding a message in a more or less random vector $$v$$ and then calculating $$B'v+e$$ for some randomly chosen noise vector $$e$$ satisfying some extra conditions. An attacker has to solve either the CVP or the SBP to obtain $$v$$ and hence to find the message.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 0870.00047].

##### MSC:
 94A60 Cryptography 68W30 Symbolic computation and algebraic computation 11Y16 Number-theoretic algorithms; complexity