Strong Keys for Tensor Isomorphism Cryptography

Sampling a non degenerate (that is, invertible) square matrix over a finite field is easy, draw a random square matrix and discard if the determinant is zero. We address the problem in higher dimensions, and sample non degenerate boundary format tensors, which generalise square matrices. Testing degeneracy is conjectured to be hard in more than two dimensions [Hillar and Lim, 2013], precluding the "draw a random tensor and discard if degenerate" recipe. The difficulty is in computing hyperdeterminants, higher dimensional analogues of determinants. Instead, we start with a structured random non degenerate tensor and scramble it by infusing more randomness while still preserving non degeneracy. We propose two kinds of scrambling. The first is multiplication in each dimension by random invertible matrices, which preserves dimension and format. Assuming pseudo randomness of this action, which also underlies tensor isomorphism based cryptography, our samples are computationally indistinguishable from uniform non degenerate tensors. The second scrambling employs tensor convolution (that generalises multiplication by matrices) and can increase dimension. Inspired by hyperdeterminant multiplicativity, we devise a recursive sampler that uses tensor convolution to reduce the problem from arbitrary to three dimensions. Our sampling is a candidate solution for drawing public keys in tensor isomorphism based cryptography, since non degenerate tensors elude recent weak key attacks targeting public key tensors either containing geometric structures such as "triangles" [Lars Ran and Simona Samardjiska, 2024] or being deficient in tensor rank [Gilchrist et al., 2024]. To accommodate our sampling, tensor isomorphism based schemes need to be instantiated in boundary formats such as (2k+1) × (k+1) × (k+1), away from the more familiar k × k × k cubic formats. Our sampling (along with the recent tensor trapdoor one-way functions [Anand Kumar Narayanan, 2025]) makes an enticing case to transition tensor isomorphism cryptography to boundary formats tensors, which are true analogues of square matrices.