International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The article introduces HPPC a new Digital Signature scheme that intends to resist known previous attacks applied to HFE-based schemes like QUARTZ and GeMMS. The idea is to use maximal degree for the central HFE polynomial whereas the trapdoor polynomial has low degree in order to sign messages by finding polynomial roots in an extension field via Berlekamp's algorithm. This work has been submitted to NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography challenge (PQC) and code is available at https://github.com/kub0x/MPKC-HPPC