The cool and the cruel: separating hard parts of LWE secrets

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Nolte, Niklas, Malhou, Mohamed, Wenger, Emily, Stevens, Samuel, Li, Cathy, Charton, François, Lauter, Kristin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Nolte, Niklas
Malhou, Mohamed
Wenger, Emily
Stevens, Samuel
Li, Cathy
Charton, François
Lauter, Kristin
author_facet Nolte, Niklas
Malhou, Mohamed
Wenger, Emily
Stevens, Samuel
Li, Cathy
Charton, François
Lauter, Kristin
contents Sparse binary LWE secrets are under consideration for standardization for Homomorphic Encryption and its applications to private computation. Known attacks on sparse binary LWE secrets include the sparse dual attack and the hybrid sparse dual-meet in the middle attack which requires significant memory. In this paper, we provide a new statistical attack with low memory requirement. The attack relies on some initial lattice reduction. The key observation is that, after lattice reduction is applied to the rows of a q-ary-like embedded random matrix $\mathbf A$, the entries with high variance are concentrated in the early columns of the extracted matrix. This allows us to separate out the "hard part" of the LWE secret. We can first solve the sub-problem of finding the "cruel" bits of the secret in the early columns, and then find the remaining "cool" bits in linear time. We use statistical techniques to distinguish distributions to identify both the cruel and the cool bits of the secret. We provide concrete attack timings for recovering secrets in dimensions $n=256$, $512$, and $768$. For the lattice reduction stage, we leverage recent improvements in lattice reduction (e.g. flatter) applied in parallel. We also apply our new attack in the RLWE setting for $2$-power cyclotomic rings, showing that these RLWE instances are much more vulnerable to this attack than LWE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_10328
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The cool and the cruel: separating hard parts of LWE secrets
Nolte, Niklas
Malhou, Mohamed
Wenger, Emily
Stevens, Samuel
Li, Cathy
Charton, François
Lauter, Kristin
Cryptography and Security
Sparse binary LWE secrets are under consideration for standardization for Homomorphic Encryption and its applications to private computation. Known attacks on sparse binary LWE secrets include the sparse dual attack and the hybrid sparse dual-meet in the middle attack which requires significant memory. In this paper, we provide a new statistical attack with low memory requirement. The attack relies on some initial lattice reduction. The key observation is that, after lattice reduction is applied to the rows of a q-ary-like embedded random matrix $\mathbf A$, the entries with high variance are concentrated in the early columns of the extracted matrix. This allows us to separate out the "hard part" of the LWE secret. We can first solve the sub-problem of finding the "cruel" bits of the secret in the early columns, and then find the remaining "cool" bits in linear time. We use statistical techniques to distinguish distributions to identify both the cruel and the cool bits of the secret. We provide concrete attack timings for recovering secrets in dimensions $n=256$, $512$, and $768$. For the lattice reduction stage, we leverage recent improvements in lattice reduction (e.g. flatter) applied in parallel. We also apply our new attack in the RLWE setting for $2$-power cyclotomic rings, showing that these RLWE instances are much more vulnerable to this attack than LWE.
title The cool and the cruel: separating hard parts of LWE secrets
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10328