Explicit isogenies in quadratic time in any characteristic

Isogenies are algebraic group morphisms of elliptic curves. Let E, E' be two (ordinary) elliptic curves defined over a finite field of characteristic p, and suppose that there exists an isogeny ψ between E and E'. The explicit isogeny problem asks to compute a rational function expression for ψ. Various specializations of this problem appear naturally in point counting and elliptic curve cryptography. There exist essentially two families of algorithms to compute isogenies. Algorithms based on Weierstraß' differential equation are very fast and well suited in the point count setting, but are clumsier in general. Algorithms based on interpolation work more generally, but have exponential complexity in log(p) (the characteristic of the finite field). We propose a new interpolation-based algorithm that solves the explicit isogeny problem in polynomial time in all the involved parameters. Our approach is inspired by a previous algorithm of Couveignes', that performs interpolation on the p-torsion on the curves. We replace the p-torsion in Couveignes' algorithm with the ℓ-torsion for some small prime ℓ; however this adaptation requires some non-trivial work on isogeny graphs in order to yield a satisfying complexity. Joint work with Cyril Hugounenq, Jérôme Plût and Éric Schost.