We describe an attack on the family of Diffie-Hellman and El-Gamal like cryptosystems recently presented at PQ Crypto 2010. We show that the reference hard problem is not hard.

In this paper, we present a practical attack on the signature scheme SFLASH proposed by Patarin, Goubin and Courtois in 2001 following a design they had introduced in 1998. The attack only needs the public key and requires about one second to forge a signature for any message, after a one-time computation of several minutes. It can be applied to both SFLASHv2 which was accepted by NESSIE, as well as to SFLASHv3 which is a higher security version.

Sflash had recently been broken by Dubois, Stern, Shamir, etc., using a differential attack on the public key. The $C^{\ast-}$ signature schemes are hence no longer practical. In this paper, we will study the new attack from the point view of symmetry, then (1) present a simple concept (projection) to modify several multivariate schemes to resist the new attacks; (2) demonstrate with practical examples that this simple method could work well; and (3) show that the same discussion of attack-and-defence applies to other big-field multivariates. The speed of encryption schemes is not affected, and we can still have a big-field multivariate signatures resisting the new differential attacks with speeds comparable to Sflash.