Attacks and parameter choices in HIMMO

The HIMMO scheme has been introduced as a lightweight collusion-resistant key pre-distribution scheme, with excellent efficiency in terms of bandwidth, energy consumption and computation time. As its cryptanalysis relies on lattice techniques, HIMMO is also an interesting quantum-safe candidate. Unlike the schemes by Blom, by Matsumoto and Imai, and by Blundo et al, which break down once the number of colluding nodes exceeds a given threshold, it aims at tolerating any number of colluding nodes. In 2015, a contest for the verification of the scheme was held. During the contest, a method was developed to guess a key by finding an approximate solution of one of the problems underlying the scheme. This attack involves finding a short vector in a lattice of dimension linear in a system parameter α and allowed key recovery for several challenges. Thwarting this attack by increasing α would lead to a significant performance degradation, as CPU and memory requirements for the implementa...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: IACR
• Authors: Oscar García Morchon, Ronald Rietman, Ludo Tolhuizen, Jose Luis Torre-Arce, Moon Sung Lee, Domingo Gómez-Pérez, Jaime Gutierrez 0001, Berry Schoenmakers
• Keywords: Biometrics, IACR 2016