(2025-06) A search to distinguish reduction for the isomorphism problem on direct sum lattices

2025-06-27

Abstract

At Eurocrypt 2003, Szydlo presented a search to distinguish reduction for the Lattice Isomorphism Problem (LIP) on the integer lattice Zn\mathbb{Z}^n. Here the search problem asks to find an isometry between Zn\mathbb{Z}^n and an isomorphic lattice, while the distinguish variant asks to distinguish between a list of auxiliary lattices related to Zn\mathbb{Z}^n.

In this work we generalize Szydlo's search to distinguish reduction in two ways. Firstly, we generalize the reduction to any lattice isomorphic to Γn\Gamma^n, where Γ\Gamma is a fixed base lattice. Secondly, we allow Γ\Gamma to be a module lattice over any number field. Assuming the base lattice Γ\Gamma and the number field KK are fixed, our reduction is polynomial in nn.

As a special case we consider the module lattice OK2\mathcal{O}_K^2 used in the module-LIP based signature scheme HAWK, and we show that one can solve the search problem, leading to a full key recovery, with less than 2d22d^2 distinguishing calls on two lattices each, where dd is the degree of the power-of-two cyclotomic number field and OK\mathcal{O}_K its ring of integers.