Isolated Curves for Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography

Abstract

We introduce the notion of isolated genus two curves. There is no known efficient algorithm to explicitly construct isogenies between two genus two curves with large conductor gap. Thus there is no known way of transporting the discrete log problem (DLP) from an isolated curve to a large set of isogenous curves by constructing isogenies. Isolated genus two curves are curves that have large conductor gap to any other endomorphism classes. Isolated curves might be more secure for DLP based hyperelliptic curve cryptography. We establish results on explicit expressions for the index of an endomorphism ring in the maximal CM order, and give conditions under which the index is a prime number or an almost prime number for three different categories of quartic CM fields. We also derived heuristic asymptotic results on the densities and distributions of isolated genus two curves with CM by any fixed quartic CM field. Computational results, which are also shown for three explicit examples, agree with heuristic prediction with errors within a tolerable range.