Solving systems of Boolean multivariate equations with quantum annealing

Polynomial systems over the binary field have important applications, especially in symmetric and asymmetric cryptanalysis, multivariate-based postquantum cryptography, coding theory, and computer algebra. In this paper, we study the quantum annealing model for solving Boolean systems of multivariate equations of degree 2, usually referred to as the multivariate quadratic problem. We present different methodologies to embed the problem into a Hamiltonian that can be solved by available quantum annealing platforms. In particular, we provide three embedding options, and we highlight their differences in terms of quantum resources. Moreover, we design a machine-agnostic algorithm that adopts an iterative approach to better solve the problem Hamiltonian by repeatedly reducing the search space. Finally, we use D-Wave devices to successfully implement our methodologies on several instances of the multivariate quadratic problem.