Reducing memory requirements for combinatorial attacks on NTRU via multiple birthdays

Abstract

In this paper we view the possibilities to lance a multiple (iterative) birthday attack on NTRU. Recently Wagner's algorithm for the generalized birthday problem [9] allowed to speed-up several combinatorial attacks. However, in the case of NTRU we can not hope to to apply Wagner's algorithm directly, as the search space does not behave nicely. In this paper we show that we can nevertheless draw profit from a multiple birthday approach. Our approach allows us to attack ees251ep6 parameter set on a computer with only 252 Bits of memory and about 29 times faster as with Odlyzko's combinatorial attack - this is an improvement factor about 243 in space complexity. We thus contradict the common believe, that in comparison to computational requirements, the "storage requirement is by far the larger obstacle" [3] to attack NTRU by combinatorial attacks. Further, our attack is about 2 7 times faster than the space-reduced variant from [3] employing the same amount of memory. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.