Cryptanalysis on “NTRU+: Compact Construction of NTRU Using Simple Encoding Method”

In IEEE TIFS 2023, NTRU+ has been proposed, an efficient lattice-based post-quantum Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), which has also been submitted to the KpqC competition. In this paper, we propose an effective classical chosen ciphertext attack to recover the transmitted session key for NTRU+ with all but negligible probability for the first time. With the proposed attacks, we show that all the suggested parameters of NTRU+ do not satisfy the claimed IND-CCA security. Moreover, we elaborate on some flaws in the security proof, a part of which introduces our attack. We also suggest a way to modify the NTRU+ scheme to defend our attack while maintaining its practical performance.