The Ring Learning-With-Errors (RLWE) problem shows great promise for
post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. We describe a new attack
on the non-dual search RLWE problem with small error widths, using ring
homomorphisms to finite fields and the chi-squared statistical test. In
particular, we identify a "subfield vulnerability" (Section 5.2) and give a new
attack which finds this vulnerability by mapping to a finite field extension
and detecting non-uniformity with respect to the number of elements in the
subfield. We use this attack to give examples of vulnerable RLWE instances in
Galois number fields. We also extend the well-known search-to-decision
reduction result to Galois fields with any unramified prime modulus q,
regardless of the residue degree f of q, and we use this in our attacks. The
time complexity of our attack is O(nq2f), where n is the degree of K and f is
the residue degree of q in K. We also show an attack on the non-dual (resp.
dual) RLWE problem with narrow error distributions in prime cyclotomic rings
when the modulus is a ramified prime (resp. any integer). We demonstrate the
attacks in practice by finding many vulnerable instances and successfully
attacking them. We include the code for all attacks