Paper 2025/1893

Poseidon(2)b: Binary Field Versions of Poseidon/Poseidon2

Dmitry Khovratovich, Ethereum Foundation, ABDK Consulting

Katharina Koschatko, Graz University of Technology

Christian Rechberger, Graz University of Technology

Markus Schofnegger, Fabric Cryptography

Verena Schröppel, Graz University of Technology

Zhuo Wu, Institute of Information Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Science

Abstract

We present Poseidonb and Poseidon2b, natural variants of Poseidon and Poseidon2, respectively, defined over binary extension fields with a target security level of 128 bits. They are specifically designed to inherit many of the circuit-friendly properties of their prime field version, and to be used together with binary extension field proving systems such as Binius. Benchmarking demonstrates the merits in proof size, proving time, and especially verification time, in comparison to traditional hash functions and other binary circuit-friendly hash functions such as Vision-32b and Anemoi. Due to the close similarity to their prime field counterparts, many existing cryptanalytic results directly carry over to Poseidonb and Poseidon2b. Nevertheless, we revisit the security analysis to incorporate recent advances in cryptanalysis and to account for attack vectors that do not arise in the prime field setting. In particular, we focus on algebraic cryptanalysis and subspace trails, techniques that resulted in attacks on initial versions of Poseidon defined over binary extension fields. Our complexity estimates are based on the ideal degree, now increasingly adopted as a standard measure in algebraic cryptanalysis.

Note: Compared to the published version, this ePrint fixes an implementation issue in the 128-bit Binius implementation. The corresponding implementation repository is available at: https://github.com/Poseidon-Hash/Poseidon2b

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1893,
      author = {Lorenzo Grassi and Dmitry Khovratovich and Katharina Koschatko and Christian Rechberger and Markus Schofnegger and Verena Schröppel and Zhuo Wu},
      title = {Poseidon(2)b: Binary Field Versions of Poseidon/Poseidon2},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1893},
      year = {2025},
      doi = {10.62056/a66ce0zn4},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1893}
}