The Impact of Decryption Failures on the Security of NTRU Encryption

NTRUEncrypt is unusual among public-key cryptosystems in that, with standard parameters, validly generated ciphertexts can fail to decrypt. This affects the provable security properties of a cryptosystem, as it limits the ability to build a simulator in the random oracle model without knowledge of the private key. We demonstrate attacks which use decryption failures to recover the private key. Such attacks work for all standard parameter sets, and one of them applies to any padding. The appropriate countermeasure is to change the parameter sets and possibly the decryption process so that decryption failures are vanishingly unlikely, and to adopt a padding scheme that prevents an attacker from directly controlling any part of the input to the encryption primitive. We outline one such candidate padding scheme.