Hidden Field Equations

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This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (June 2007)

Hidden Fields Equations, commonly abbreviated to HFE, is a public key cryptosystem. HFE uses polynomial operations over finite fields. It was proposed by Jacques Patarin at Eurocrypt 96 following the ideas of Matsumoto and Imai. It has long been regarded as the most promising cryptosystem of the kind.^{[citation needed]} Some advanced attacks were discovered on HFE, none of them has been devastating, however.^{[citation needed]} HFE is very fast in encryption and produces short digital signatures. It is much less studied than the RSA. HFE has been patented by Jacques Patarin. The patent expires on July 24, 2016.

[edit] External links

• Nicolas Courtois HFE page