On the Hardness of the NTRU Problem

The NTRU problem is an algorithmic problem over structured lattices that was introduced by Hoffstein, Pipher, and Silverman more than 20 years ago, and which has been used to construct various cryptographic primitives. However, its relations to other lattice problems is still not well understood.

In this talk, we will see different variants of the NTRU problem, and study how they compare to each other, and to other more classical lattice problems, in terms of reductions. More precisely, we will show that a search variant of the NTRU problem is at least as hard as the shortest vector problem (SVP) in ideal lattices; and that the decisional variant of NTRU is at least as hard as another search variant of NTRU. Unfortunately, the two search variants of NTRU that are considered in these reductions do not match, meaning that we cannot combine the reductions in order to obtain a reduction from the ideal shortest vector problem to the decisional NTRU problem.

Joint work with Damien Stehlé.