Hidden Field Equations

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HFE stands for Hidden Fields Equations.

It is a public key cryptosystem using polynomial operations over finite fields. It has been proposed by Patarin at Eurocrypt 96 following the ideas of Matsumoto and Imai. It has long been regarded as the most promising cryptosystem of the kind. Some advanced attacks were discovered on HFE, none of them has been devastating, however. HFE is very fast in encryption and it produces short digital signatures. It is much less studied that the RSA. HFE has been patented by Jacques Patarin. The patent expires on July 24, 2016.