Paper 2006/320

CMSS -- An Improved Merkle Signature Scheme

Johannes Buchmann, Luis Carlos Coronado Garcia, Erik Dahmen, Martin Doering, and Elena Klintsevich

Abstract

The Merkle signature scheme (MSS) is an interesting alternative for well established signature schemes such as RSA, DSA, and ECDSA. The security of MSS only relies on the existence of cryptographically secure hash functions. MSS has a good chance of being quantum computer resistant. In this paper, we propose CMSS, a variant of MSS, with reduced private key size, key pair generation time, and signature generation time. We demonstrate that CMSS is competitive in practice by presenting a highly efficient implementation within the Java Cryptographic Service Provider FlexiProvider. We present extensive experimental results and show that our implementation can for example be used to sign messages in Microsoft Outlook.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords
Merkle SignaturesOne-Time-SignaturesPost-Quantum SignaturesTree Authentication
Contact author(s)
dahmen @ cdc informatik tu-darmstadt de
History
2006-09-21: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2006/320
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2006/320,
      author = {Johannes Buchmann and Luis Carlos Coronado Garcia and Erik Dahmen and Martin Doering and Elena Klintsevich},
      title = {CMSS -- An Improved Merkle Signature Scheme},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2006/320},
      year = {2006},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/320}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/320}
}
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