When e-th roots become easier than factoring

  • Authors:
  • Antoine Joux;David Naccache;Emmanuel Thomé

  • Affiliations:
  • DGA and Université de Versailles, Versailles cedex, France;École Normale Supérieure, Équipe de Cryptographie, Paris cedex 05, France;INRIA Lorraine, LORIA, CACAO, Villiers-lès-Nancy cedex, France

  • Venue:
  • ASIACRYPT'07 Proceedings of the Advances in Crypotology 13th international conference on Theory and application of cryptology and information security
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We show that computing e-th roots modulo n is easier than factoring n with currently known methods, given subexponential access to an oracle outputting the roots of numbers of the form xi + c. Here c is fixed and xi denotes small integers of the attacker's choosing. The attack comes in two flavors: - A first version is illustrated here by producing selective roots of the form xi + c in Ln(1/3, 3√32/9). This matches the special number field sieve's (SNFS) complexity. - A second variant computes arbitrary e-th roots in Ln (1/3, γ) after a subexponential number of oracle queries. The constant γ depends on the type of oracle used. This addresses in particular the One More rsa Inversion problem, where the e-th root oracle is not restricted to numbers of a special form. The aforementioned constant γ is then 3√32/9. Constraining the oracle to roots of the form e√xi + c mod n increases γ. Both methods are faster than factoring n using the GNFS (Ln(1/3, 3√64/9)). This sheds additional light on rsa's malleability in general and on rsa's resistance to affine forgeries in particular - a problem known to be polynomial for xi 3√n, but for which no algorithm faster than factoring was known before this work.