International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Epsilon-biased distribution has many applications in practice, including universal hashing computation. In this paper we will improve an existing epsilon-biased distribution construction due to Alon et al. that requires to uniformly and efficiently sample irreducible polynomials of a large degree, e.g. between 80 and 160. To remove the need for such a sampling which can be computationally expensive, we will replace the irreducible polynomials by random monic polynomials of higher degree, i.e. every degree r monic polynomial whether irreducible or reducible is selected with the same probability 2^{-r}. To analyse the security of the scheme, we need to

find the maximum number of degree r polynomials that divide a degree n polynomial where n > r.