We draw a new connection between Coppersmith's method for finding small solutions to polynomial congruences modulo integers and the capacity theory of adelic subsets of algebraic curves. Coppersmith's method uses lattice basis reduction to construct an auxiliary polynomial that vanishes at the desired solutions. Capacity theory provides a toolkit for proving when polynomials with certain boundedness properties do or do not exist. Using capacity theory, we prove that Coppersmith's bound for univariate polynomials is optimal in the sense that there are auxiliary polynomials of the type he used that would allow finding roots of size @math for monic degree- @math polynomials modulo @math . Our results rule out the existence of polynomials of any degree and do not rely on lattice algorithms, thus eliminating the possibility of even superpolynomial-time improvements to Coppersmith's bound. We extend this result to constructions of auxiliary polynomials using binomial polynomials, and rule out the existence of any auxiliary polynomial of this form that would find solutions of size @math unless @math has a very small prime factor.
This paper proposes a novel public-key cryptosystem, which is practical, provably secure and has some other interesting properties as follows: 1. Its trapdoor technique is essentially different from any other previous schemes including RSA-Rabin and Diffie-Hellman. 2. It is a probabilistic encryption scheme. 3. It can be proven to be as secure as the intractability of factoring n = p2q (in the sense of the security of the whole plaintext) against passive adversaries. 4. It is semantically secure under the p-subgroup assumption, which is comparable to the quadratic residue and higher degree residue assumptions. 5. Under the most practical environment, the encryption and decryption speeds of our scheme are comparable to (around twice slower than) those of elliptic curve cryptosystems. 6. It has a homomorphic property: E(m0, r0)E(m1, r1) mod n = E(@#@ m0 + m1, r2), where E(m, r) means a ciphertext of plaintext m as randomized by r and m0+ m1 < p. 7. Anyone can change a ciphertext, C = E(m, r), into another ciphertext, C′ = Chr' mod n, while preserving plaintext of C (i.e., C′ = E(m,r″)), and the relationship between C and C′ can be concealed.