Making NTRU as Secure as Worst-Case Problems over Ideal Lattices

Damien Stehlé and Ron Steinfeld

Abstract: NTRUEncrypt, proposed in 1996 by Hoffstein, Pipher and Silverman, is the fastest known lattice-based encryption scheme. Its moderate key-sizes, excellent asymptotic performance and conjectured resistance to quantum computers could make it a desirable alternative to factorisation and discrete-log based encryption schemes. However, since its introduction, doubts have regularly arisen on its security. In the present work, we show how to modify NTRUEncrypt to make it provably secure in the standard model, under the assumed quantum hardness of standard worst-case lattice problems, restricted to a family of lattices related to some cyclotomic fields. Our main contribution is to show that if the secret key polynomials are selected by rejection from discrete Gaussians, then the public key, which is their ratio, is statistically indistinguishable from uniform over its domain. The security then follows from the already proven hardness of the Ring-LWE problem.

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