Breaking UOV Encryption: Key Recovery Attack On Olivier

Paper 2025/2266

Breaking UOV Encryption: Key Recovery Attack On Olivier

Emanuele Cornaggia

Abstract

The Oil and Vinegar (OV) trapdoor is widely used in signature schemes such as UOV and MAYO. Recently, Esposito et al. proposed OliVier, an encryption scheme based on this trapdoor. However, the OV trapdoor was originally designed for signatures, and adapting it to encryption introduces inherent challenges. We identify two such challenges and analyze how OliVier addresses the first, while showing that the unresolved second challenge enables a practical key-recovery attack. We conclude that any scheme using the OV trapdoor for encryption must also solve this second problem, for which no efficient solution is currently known.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: Post-Quantum Cryptography Multivariate Cryptography UOV
Contact author(s): emanuele cornaggia @ gmail com
History: 2025-12-18: approved; 2025-12-17: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/2266
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/2266,
      author = {Emanuele Cornaggia},
      title = {Breaking {UOV} Encryption: Key Recovery Attack On Olivier},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/2266},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/2266}
}