An Implementation of the Extended Tower Number Field Sieve using 4d Sieving in a Box and a Record Computation in Fp4

Abstract: We report on an implementation of the Extended Tower Number Field Sieve (ExTNFS) and record computation in a medium characteristic finite field $\mathbb{F}{p^4}$ of 512 bits size. Empirically, we show that sieving in a 4-dimensional box (orthotope) for collecting relations for ExTNFS in $\mathbb{F}{p^4}$ is faster than sieving in a 4-dimensional hypersphere. We also give a new intermediate descent method, `descent using random vectors', without which the descent stage in our ExTNFS computation would have been difficult/impossible, and analyze its complexity.