A unified framework for small secret exponent attack on RSA

Abstract

We address a lattice based method on small secret exponent attack on RSA scheme. Boneh and Durfee reduced the attack into finding small roots of a bivariate modular equation: , where N is an RSA moduli and e is the RSA public key. Boneh and Durfee proposed a lattice based algorithm for solving the problem. When the secret exponent d is less than N 0.292, their method breaks RSA scheme. Since the lattice used in the analysis is not full-rank, the analysis is not easy. Blömer and May gave an alternative algorithm. Although their bound d ≤ N 0.290 is worse than Boneh-Durfee result, their method used a full rank lattice. However, the proof for their bound is still complicated. Herrmann and May gave an elementary proof for the Boneh-Durfee's bound: d ≤ N 0.292. In this paper, we first give an elementary proof for achieving the bound of Blömer-May: d ≤ N 0.290. Our proof employs unravelled linearization technique introduced by Herrmann and May and is rather simpler than Blömer-May's proof. Then, we provide a unified framework to construct a lattice that are used for solving the problem, which includes two previous method: Herrmann-May and Blömer-May methods as a special case. Furthermore, we prove that the bound of Boneh-Durfee: d ≤ N 0.292 is still optimal in our unified framework. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.