Multivariable public-key cryptosystems

Recently Landau and Diffie gave in a series of articles in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society [DL02, Lan01, Lan00a, Lan00b] and in the American Mathematical Monthly [Lan04] excellent expositions on how the theory of multivariable polynomials are used in cryptography. However they covered only half of the story. They covered only the theory of polynomials in symmetric or secret cryptography. There is another half of the story, namely the story about the theory of multivariable polynomials in asymmetric or public key cryptosystems. The importance of the theory of multivariable cryptosystems is manifested in the recent selection of Sflash by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme of the European Commission for the New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity, and Encryption project (NESSIE) [NES] as one of the security standards for low-cost smart card. Sflash belongs to one of the families of public key cryptosystems, which have been developed in the last ten years.