Improvements of Algebraic Attacks for solving the Rank Decoding and MinRank problems

Abstract

Rank Decoding (RD) is the main underlying problem in rank-based cryptography. Based on this problem and quasi-cyclic versions of it, very efficient schemes have been proposed recently, such as those in the ROLLO and RQC submissions, which have reached the second round of the NIST Post-Quantum competition. Two main approaches have been studied to solve RD: combinatorial ones and algebraic ones. While the former has been studied extensively, a better understanding of the latter was recently obtained by Bardet et al. (EUROCRYPT20) where it appeared that algebraic attacks can often be more efficient than combinatorial ones for cryptographic parameters. This paper gives substantial improvements upon this attack in terms both of complexity and of the assumptions required by the cryptanalysis. We present attacks for ROLLO-I-128, 192, and 256 with bit complexity respectively in 70, 86, and 158, to be compared to 117, 144, and 197 for the aforementionned previous attack. Moreover, unlike this previous attack, ours does not need generic Gr\"obner basis algorithms since it only requires to solve a linear system. For a case called overdetermined, this modeling allows us to avoid Gr\"obner basis computations by going directly to solving a linear system. For the other case, called underdetermined, we also improve the results from the previous attack by combining the Ourivski-Johansson modeling together with a new modeling for a generic MinRank instance; the latter modeling allows us to refine the analysis of MinRank's complexity given in the paper by Verbel et al. (PQC19). Finally, since the proposed parameters of ROLLO and RQC are completely broken by our new attack, we give examples of new parameters for ROLLO and RQC that make them resistant to our attacks. These new parameters show that these systems remain attractive, with a loss of only about 50\% in terms of key size for ROLLO-I.